Cooper, Kerry & Jamee

Dear Friends and Family, MERRY CHRISTMAS! We hope this letter finds you well in all of this stormy, cold weather.  Like most of the country, we have been hit with extreme low temperatures.  We have had cold and wind which has translated to temperatures as low as -22 degrees with wind chill.  We have had a little more snow, but mostly cold.  They cancelled church today because of the cold.  I didn't think is was that bad today, but they wanted to err on the side of caution and we think most of the members wanted to stay home and stay warm on this Christmas day.  We had a wonderful Tri-Zone Conference on Tuesday in a chapel in a small town called Sissonville near our mission home in Charleston.  It was almost a 3 1/2 drive for us.  Most of our zone conferences are for teaching and training the missionaries.  This was more of a Christmas party.  We even got to wear our ugly Christmas sweaters.  In most zone meetings we have break-out s...

Dear Family and Friends, Well, nothing too interesting or important this week.  As I have mentioned before, we go to a branch empty nester Family Home Evening each Monday.  We really look forward to them.  This week was our turn to take dessert.  Since it is the holidays, I decided to take my (in)famous cinnamon rolls. I didn't think it was my best effort, for example I forgot to put salt into the dough mixture and had to improvise, but they loved them.  Bro. Flannagan, whose house is our meeting place, said they were phenomenal, maybe the best he has ever had.  It always makes me feel good when people appreciate my hard work.  On Wednesday we prepared dinner for the Flannagan's.  They are such a good couple and are very generous to the missionaries. They are the couple that invited us to Thanksgiving dinner and have had us over for dinner two or three times.  He has some health issues and it is hard for him to cook meals and she works all da...

Dear Family and Friends, We want to start with an experience we had this past week that taught us the importance of listening to and heeding the spiritual promptings we receive.  We have a good member of our branch who is so faithful but can't participate in everything because of health and mobility issues.  He has some kind of arthritis in his back and he is a really big man (500+ pounds).  He is in pain most of the time and it seems to be getting worse. Last week he fell and couldn't get up and laid on the floor for at least an hour before his wife got home from work. He started thinking he was a burden to everyone and couldn't see any purpose for him to be alive. He was really depressed and in a lot of pain. He had just renewed all of his pain medications and sleeping pills and thought he could take all of those and be done with it.  We had heard he had fallen and and were going to go by at some point and visit.. On our way to deliver another invitation, I got a s...

Dear Family and Friends, The best news is we made it to the best month of the year. Christmas will be here before we know it.  We had a Christmas Devotional at our stake center yesterday. We didn't know anything about it until the young elders asked for a ride because they didn't have enough miles left on their car.  The stake center is about and hour and a half away from Oakland. It was all music with a little narration and a short message from our Stake President.  We have some very talented people in out stake.  Music can bring the spirit into a meeting like nothing else, especially at Christmas time. We spent some time again this week delivering invitations to the branch Christmas dinner.  And we had some success this week!  We visited a man that had been active several years ago but hasn't been to church in years. We gave him an invitation and had a short visit with him.  He's a really nice guy and wants us to come back to visit sometime. Later in...