July 1st 2011

Sister Callaway returned home before noon today.  She was greeted by SO MANY family and friends welcoming her home. Its so great to hear her laughing with her sisters again!!

Week 76 06/29/2011

Heres her last letter!!

Subject:	bye bye iowa!!! hello california!!
To:	macfamilyfarm@surewest.net

Howdy ya’ll!!! How is everybody!? I hope its been a good week for you guys! Its been a good week here!

Well, last Tuesday sister Freitag got to go on her going home temple trip so we had to wake up at 3 that morning and drive 2 hours to des moines and I got to spend the day there with sister knoelk while sister frietag went to Nauvoo with the rest of the group. Sister knoelk is still pretty new and neither of us had a gps so we spent a good amount of the day being lost but it was fun. We got to go and visit with a few of their investigators and some members and we went and did some service at a retirement home in their area. So at the end of the day we went back to the stake center where we were supposed to meet everyone that was coming back from the temple trip at 9 but the van that they took broke down so they didn’t end up getting there till about 9:45 and then sister Freitag and I had to drive the hours back to lenox. That’s a later night for a missionary, we were all sorts a tuckered out! Ha. Wednesday we had a really good lesson with kyle and Jessica and talked to them more the basics of the gospel, why we are baptized and they are both really looking forward to it. They’ve got atleast a couple more weeks before that though in july. Last Thursday we got to go to our branch presidents house for dinner and got to help them feed their baby cows, that was a whole new experience for sister Freitag but it was fun. Saturday Lenox had a big grill out to kick off their 150^th anniversary civil war re-enactment. They had people dressed up, dancing, playin the fiddle, banjo and everything. I felt like I was in a movie. It was super fun though. Yesterday we got to do a lot of walking cuz we’re pretty much out of miles for the month and we got to see a lot of people in corning and we met with mary again and it was an amazing lesson! She felt the spirit so much and she cant wait to get baptized. We set a date with her yesterday for either the 2^nd or 3^rd Saturday in august but it all depends on when her daughter comes into town from Missouri because she wants her to be here for it. I wish I could be here for hers and kyle and Jessicas baptism. But as long as it happens im good. That’s pretty much what we’ve been up to for the last week.

I cant believe I get to see you guys on Friday. Crazy! Im gonna miss iowa soo much and the people like crazy! Im cant explain how much I’ve loved the last year and a half that ive spent here. I love being a missionary and sharing the gospel with the people here. Its changed me so much. The church is true everybody!!! I love it! I cant wait to see you all!!!!!!! Thank you soo much for everything!!!!

Iowa’s like a fungus….it grows on ya!!!

Till Friday,

Sister C

Week 75 06/20/2011 One more email to go!!

I can't believe we are finally here. Next week will be her last letter from the mission field. When she is home she will write her final letter for her blog. Thank you all for your love and support you have given her. We are truley blessed.

sorry this is gonna be a little short today. This week was awesome!. We were able to teach Kyle (the kid who just got out of jail) and his cousin Jessica this week. They are AMAZING. Jessica got an answer that this is the path she needs to go on and in just a couple of days read through half of first Nephi and loves learning. She is so in tune and has such a depth of understanding in the Gospel, she amazes us when we ask a question, her answers are more than perfect. Kyle is doing well, but has not got an answer to his prayers yet...I have never seen someone be so disappointed for not receiving an answer...he cried! He is not a kid you imagine crying especially not over not receiving an answer to a prayer. But he is still working on it and is still willing to try to do more. They both came to church on Sunday and it went pretty well. Jessica got all signed up for Girls Camp and they are signing her up for Youth Conference as well! She is just jumping right in. I am so excited for them. We met with another lady this week, her daughter just got baptized at the end of May and has been talking to her more about the Gospel. The daughter lives in Southern Illinois so she got ahold of us to ask us to go visit her mom. We had a great first lesson with her, she assured us that if this isn't what she wanted then we wouldn't be there. She seems very promising and is very open. She wants changes in her life and thinks now is the perfect time to do it, she is 52 and wants the second half of her life to be better, and wants to be closer to her daughter and believes this will help. So those are the exciting things we had going on this week. i love you all! have an awesome week!! next week is transfers so i will email onn wednesday!!

till next time,

-sister c

Week 74 06/13/2011 18 DAYS TO GO!!!!

Hello family!!! sounds like it was an exciting weekend. I cant believe haley and zach are in high school now. Thats weird. i hear the weathers been starting to get alittle better out there now. its pouring right now out here and the allergies have been horrible! but thats alright.

Well as for us here in the great state of IOWA it wasnt a very eventful week actually. Sister freitag and I were both super sick most of the week so we spent a lot of time inside. But towards the end of the week we started feelin a little better. We actually got to go out to a member in the branch, sister leonards ranch and help her with her horses and chores around the ranch that day. We met with one of our investigators, kim this week and her twin daughters mattea and mariah this week and did some service with them at their house. We're just trying to get them to come to church but kim is really paranoid to be around people in public. Other than that we had a couple other lessons that our investigators didnt show up for. Aban skipped out on our appointment with him but he called us and wanted to set something up for this week. On saturday we got to go to des moines for the multi-stake relief society conference that sister allred from the general relief society presidency spoke at. Oh my gosh, I got to see grandma mathusek and sister fagersten from cedar falls and leslie lee, sister gelder, sister jeppsen and a couple other people from iowa city. I was so excited! I love them! It was a really good conference. Sunday was an awesome day at church. One of our members, renae gave a talk and she brought her son kyle and a couple of his frends to church with her. Kyle just got out of jail this last week and told his mom he wanted to go to church with her and when we were talking to him after church he told he wanted us to come and teach him and he wants to get baptized! Sweet!!!!! he's a really good guy, just wrong places at the wrong times but maybe it was just the wrong place at the right time for him to realize whats important and the changes he needs to make in his life. We're gonna be meeting with him on wednesday!!its gonna be awesome!! it's gonna be a good week!!!!

I love you all!! have an awesome week!!! thank you for everything!!! happy fathers day to all the daddies!!!! you're awesome!!
till next time,
Sister C

Week 73 06/06/2011 25 days to go!!!

Hello hello family!! I hope you guys had a fabulous weekend! I cant believe haley and zac are both gonna be goin to high school...wierd! Is the weather getting any better at home? Its getting pretty hot and humid here. I definitely wont miss the humidity when I leave.

We had a pretty good week here in lenox! We worked with a lot of our members this week and had some really good lessons with them. Earleir last week we had this guy call us that said that he wanted to meet with us. So we were super excited about that. His name's Aban and he's from honduras but he's lived here since he was about 15 or 16 and turns out that he's really good friends with one of the less active members in our branch, freddie. Aban said that freddie had been talking to him about the church alittle bit and aban said that he has really been wanting to change things in his life and wanting to come closer to god. So we went over and met with him on thursday and took brother and sister wangberg with us (ps. Brother wangberg reminds me so much of dad). So we were teaching him about the restoration and the spirit was super strong and you could just tell how much aban wants to follow Christ and we were gonna ask him if he would be baptized once he knew that the things we were sharing with him were true and then he started talkin about how when he was 10 he went to our church over in honduras all the time by himself and he got baptized. Well alright then..deed already done. And he came to church yesterday which was awesome to have someone there for the members to work with. Other than that we had the rest of appointments with investigators fall through this last week but this we'll hopefully be able to have some appointments that actually happen.

Update on Crazy nancy: she stole our front porch light and some more rocks from our yard. Haha. Shes getting a nice little collection there and apparently she went out in the middle of the night and painted the back of our neighbors car and she likes to spray paint her face. Haha.

Well thats about it for now, the lbrary's closing for lunch along with the rest of the town. Gotta go. I love you all!!!!! have an awesome week!!!!

till next time,

Sister C

Week 72 05/31/2011 FOUR MORE WEEKS!!

Subject:	tis the season...allergy season!!!
To:

Happy Tuesday everyone!!! How was your guys’ memorial day weekend? Do anything fun? Summer times here and schools gettin out…whoo hoo!! I cant believe amys gonna be starting drivers ed..weird! I think she should just be cool like me and wait till shes 18. lol. I totally spaced it when I was emailing last week but happy day of birth last week brit! And uncle pauls getttin hitched this week!! One word….awesome!!! im so excited for him! Tell him I love him and give him a big hug for me and tennyson too!! Tell him im so excited for him to go to brazil!! My goodness everyones goin there, im feelin kinda left out. Not really actually, iowa’s so much better. We’ve got cows, corn, pigs and soybeans..what more could you want. Lol. I cant believe its still snowin up in the mountains. That’s crazy.

We had a pretty good week. We had most our appointments with investigators fall through but we found stuff to keep us busy. We spent almost an entire day helping one of the less active ladies in our branch, sister cheney around her house. She’s older and lives by herself and she needed help re-gluing all of her wall paper in her family room so sister Freitag and I were up on ladders all day. It was really nice though, we got to know sister cheney and help her and she came to church on Sunday which was really nice to see her there. She’s such a funny cooky old lady that likes to sneak things into you car when your not looking, like a cactus. We spent some time at a less active members house, the zimmermans. Oh my gosh, I love them!! They’re soo awesome! They’re in their late 60’s and sister Zimmerman (first name’s Ginny) says she was baptized a long time ago but no one has her records and no one knows where they are so we’re not sure if she really was baptized or not. But she and her husband are amazing. Saturday was awesome. One of the towns that we cover is called Bedford and on Saturday they had their annual “Bedford in Bloom” festival. One of the members of our branch was the head chairman of it and had sister Freitag and I really involved in it. There are a lot of towns in our area that don’t accept “outsiders” very well especially when you knock on their door so we’ve been trying to do service in those towns so that we can be seen and get to know the people that live there that way and Bedford is one of those towns. So on Saturday we got to help out at the festival with the talent show which is a big thing here, some of the kids games and then with their “blazin bbq bash” contest. Let me tell you Iowans take their grill outs VERY seriously. They had different categories like: chicken, ribs, briskets, pork butt you name it they grill it. So they had like 6 different judges for each category but the jusdges couldn’t know who made what and the grillers couldn’t know who the judges were so it was double blind. so sister Freitag and I were the runners who went around and collected the meat and couldn’t let the grillers see the judges and took the meat for them. It was really fun and we got to talk to a lot of people and gave a couple book of mormons away. The elders that are in our district also came out for the day and helped out with the karaoke so the town was kinda stuck with us, they couldn’t get away even if they wanted to we were everywhere. Haha. It was a really good day. We had a really good day at church on Sunday. We had a couple less active members come which was awesome. Yesterday for memorial day Ginny (sis. Zimmerman) and her sister myrtle (we like to call her old myrty) took us to a memorial day service at the cemetery in their home town called diagonal that has a whopin 250 people and most of the towns that we cover are about that size. The service at the cemetery was really good and everyone that was there went and had lunch at the community center afterwards and Ginny was introducing us to all her old friends that shes known her entire life. It was really good to meet pretty much the entire town at the same time and having someone that they all love be the one to introduce us to them all.

Well we’ve got some appointment set up this week that should be really good and hopefully we’ll be finding some new people to teach and get this place up and goin.

I think that’s about it for us here in good ole lenox iowa!! I love you all so much! Have an awesome week!!!!

Till next time,

Sister C

Week 71 5/23/2011

Subject:	HELLO LENOX!!!
To:

HELLO HELLOOO!!!! hows it goin!?! I just wanna let everyone know that you're all awesome!!! and I love you so much! Thank you for all your letters and everything! Thank you for the plate and the cookies mom!!!

Im in Lenox Iowa! Yeah baby! It is the tiniest little town, smaller than maquoketa. Its so cute! They've got sirens that go off everyday at 8am (its time to go to work) 12 ( its time for to go to lunch), 1(time to go back to work) and 5 (time to go home). Pretty much everything closes during the day for lunch, theres 1200 people in lenox everyone knows eachother. My new companion is sister freitag and shes awesome!!! she's from vegas and she goes home just the transfer after me. So we're totally hangin out when she gets home. We've got our own cute little house with our own yard and backporch and everything. Its so cute! We've got a neighbor that everyone calls crazy nancy! She doesnt like it when we leave our front porch light on at night so she comes and unscrews it so we think its burnt out but then we just screw it back in and she goes and collects/steals rocks from all the neighbors yard and lines them down her driveway. Its really entertaining to watch. Lol. I might get to see a tornado after all before I go home! There was a tornado in town that touched down in our neighbors yard the week before I got here and they've said that there might be one coming. Yay!!! its an awesome little town. We cover 24 other towns in our area and a few of them are about the same size but most of them are smaller than lenox. We dont actually have a church building so on sundays we have church in an old house that the church bought to use. We have a really small branch. Theres like one kid in primary. We have have sacrament in what would normally be the family room, the basement bedrooms are the young men/young womens rooms and the primary (for when there are kids there) and the nursery, we have sunday school and priesthood in the garage which is so funny to me and then Relief society in one of the bedrooms. Haha.

Well my first day here we had an awesome lesson with this new guy named juston. Everything he says makes him sound like he's already a member. Haha. He's totally looking for the truth and he so badly just wants to follow god and jesus christ and live a good life. He went on and on about how he wants to be a better disciple of christ. We're gonna be meeting with him again this week. It should be another awesome lesson. We've actually got a good amount of people we're going to be meeting with this week. Awesome things are gonna happen here this transfer! Im soo excited!!! its gonna be awesome in every way!!!!

well, I love you ALL!! I want everyone to have a fan-freakin-tastic week!!! stay awesome!! be good! CTR!!! i'll talk to you next week!!

till next time,

Sister C

ps. if you look on youtube you can watch the tornado from last week. (lenox iowa tornado)