Hey everyone!  This is the late Sister Reed writing... now known as Tiara again.  :)

The last couple of days have been full of travel.  Me and Sister Fronk took the night train for the last time from Krasnoyarsk to Novo.  It was a sad experience knowing that we wouldn't be able to ride the Siberian railway again...
The next day we had our final interviews and then an evening at President's house where we did some "tie-cutting ceremony."  (I'm not exactly sure what it means.)  :)  Then the next morning early we flew out of Novosibirsk and the travelling started.  We flew from Novo to Moscow (4.15 hours).  Then from Moscow to New York (10 hours).  Then in New York we all parted ways :( (there were 4 of us sisters) and I took a 6 hour flight to Seattle.  I finally got into Spokane at about 12.30 in the morning on Friday, the same day that I left.  :) 

CRAZY.

On Saturday I got released by my Stake President.  Emotional experience.  I can't imagine any other life except being a missionary.  I already miss Russia so much!  And all my loved ones!!  It is a tough transition like every returned missionary knows.  I am so so grateful that I had the opportunity to serve the Lord. 
I am so grateful for the last 1 1/2 years and all the experiences that Heavenly Father blessed me with.  I would never take that time back!  I can't imagine my life without my mission, and the people that I've met on my mission.

I know that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the one true church on the earth.  I know that Jesus Christ is our savior and redeemer.  He is my best friend.  I am so grateful that He performed the atonement for us so we could repent and be cleansed from our sins.  Only through Him can we return to live with our Heavenly father for eternity. 
I know that Heavenly Father has a plan for every one of His children, and He wants us all to return to live with Him someday.  Through the gospel of Jesus Christ we know how to do this. 

Thank you everyone for following this blog and sharing this part of my life with me. 

I love you all!!

Love,
(Sister) Tiara Reed :)

Hello!

This will be the second to last e-mail you receive from Siberia!  Crazy, huh?!?!?!?  I still can't believe that it's true.  Time has flown by and it makes me sick haha.

Well I am here now in this lovely, but cold city of Krasnoyarsk.  It is very pretty here.  I always wanted to serve here because I knerw that it was pretty, and has mountains and things around where the other cities don't really.  I have enjoyed being here so far.  My second day here I gave a talk in the ward... which is way super small.  I'm not sure if it is just small, or if there are a ton of non-actives.  It seems like there are a ton of people on the ward list.  Anyway, I gave a talk about Family Home Evening and how it strengthens families.  I reminisced and thought about the family evenings we had as I was growing up.  Good times.  :)  It's true that maybe we won't remember every lesson we had or what exactly we did, but that we were consistent.  Like Elder Bednar says, that's the most important thing, and it had/has a big meaning to me that we did that.

My new companion for the two weeks is Sister Filatova.  She's way cool!  This is her third transfer, so I have another step-daughter!  :)  It's been fun, and I'm grateful that I could finish my mish with her.
Can't say much about investigators because we don't really have any promising ones here.  We are on the search!  I can't believe how much searching I've been doing my whole mission.  Of course I want to see something happen from all of this, but I try to have faith that God knows best.  I'm just trying to do my part.


So Krasnoyarsk is a big city, and there are actually 2 sets of sisters here now.  Sister Fronk and Fesenko are on the other bank.  Our areas are separated by a river.  There are 3 branches.  I was way dissapointed when I went to English on our bank, and FOUR people came.  What?!?  It was a big bummer to see.  I guess they've really tried hard to get English going, but they can't seem to do it very well.
I'll try to take as many pics as I can and show them to you later.

We had a conference just for sisters yesterday and it was pretty cool.  there will be 5 sisters leaving really soon to go home, so they organized this conference for the newer sisters (who are all way young.. the oldest is about a year, and then the next oldest is 6 months on the mission) so they could get advice and instruction because they will be the leaders soon.  It was a good conference- we had it at Pres's house.  Cozy.  Here's a pic from it.  My comp is in the pink shirt with the brown blazer standing up.

Dad- I will be sure to get you a hat :)  and some ties.  Thanks for your testimony!  It helps me and strengthens me.  We are all so blessed to have been born in this church!  I love you!

Mom- Don't worry about last week- it's okay!  :)  Thanks for the pic-- Joslyn is way funny.  :)  you still didn't answer me about the boots.  Do you want some?  I think that the ones I am using you will not want to use.  They have gotten pretty bad these last couple of months.  Let me know.  I love you!

Dayton and Ashley- Congratulations!!!  That's way cool that you're having a boy!  Let me know when you decide on a name!  And thanks for all the work you did on my comp-- man, it'll be so sweet.  Oh, and Dayton- there's an elder here that's from the Nashville area.  His name is Beau Lilenquist.  Which cities did you serve in around Nashville?

Krystine-  Thanks for your e-mail!  I love you!  You're amazing!

I hope you all have a wonderful week!  I love you all!

Love,
Sister Reed

Hi-

This will be my last p-day in Novo and then I'm off to Krasnoyarsk.

First off, I wanted to ask about buying stuff--
Mom, I know that you wanted boots, right?  I was wondering how much you would be willing to spend?  A good pair is about $90 probably-- and could you please measure your calf?  :)  It does matter. :)
Also, if anyone wants some cheap but cool Russian ties, they cost about 250 rubles which I believe is about $7 or $8.  Let me know!  It's super cheap and they're pretty cool!
And I found out that men's russian hats are about $40-$60.  Would you still like one?  Okay, let me know what you want!

Well I'm not quite sure what to update you on.... things are pretty much the same.  The investigators that we had any hope in kinda all fell off the face of the earth, and we haven't been able to meet in a long while.  :(
But we've had the opportunity to meet with our recent convert, Galya, a lot more lately, and that makes us happy. :)  We were happy to see her and her whole family at church on Sunday... which is way cool because her Mom and Grandpa are both inactive.  But they all came! That was one of the happy moments of the week.  That, and we have been talking to members of the church more about missionary work and sharing the gospel with their friends.  It is a joy when they are excited to do it and promise to share the joy that they have in their lives with those they love.

I would also like to do that:  I am so happy that I have a knowledge of my Savior, Jesus Christ.  I know that He is our redeemer, and through Him, we can return to live with our loving Heavenly Father.  We can receive forgiveness of our sins through Him.  I know that we have a prophet on the earth today, and that he receives revelation from God.  We can find happiness and safety in our lives when we listen to his words and follow what He says.  He is called of God.  I know that the scriptures are holy word of God.  I know that they are written for us to help us find our way through this hectic life.  God loves us so much that He really didn't leave us here alone, but He has supplied us with all sorts of ways to receive guidance in our lives.  I am so grateful for prayer and the power it brings when we sincerely pray to Heavenly Father from our hearts and follow the guidance He gives.
I love this gospel!  I know that God's church is on the earth, restored again through the prophet, Joseph Smith.

I hope you all have a super great week!  I hope all of those spiders have ran away out of my room!

I love you all!

Sister Reed :)

                                           1) Pink house!

                                           2) Crazy right?

3) We had a New Years party-- there is Snegurichka in the blue (she's Ded Moroz's grnddaughter.  Ded Moroz is their Santa)

                          4) Me and Sis Vasilevskaya

    5) The gospel will be preached in every land and on every sea!

                                   6) English Club

Well I don't know if it'll be on a plane or on a train, but I am actually leaving.  Can you believe it?  (And I actually found out early- President hasn't announced transfers yet! (those office elders have been slacking on their secret-keeping skills!) )  I'm headed to Krasnoyarsk for my last 2 weeks of my mission!  haha--- it's pretty crazy.  But I'm actually really excited.  It's the one city that I always desired to serve in.  So on Friday, I'll hear the news, and then the following week sometime I'll be heading out.  Of course I'll be sad that I'm leaving because I really did grow to love people here in Novo the short time I was here.  But I know that the Lord knows best!

So thanks so much for the e-mails!  As usual, I love hearing about your lives and what's going on!  And I LOVED the pics!!!  Man, Joslyn and Clay are both so big!  And SO cute!!!  :) :)

My New Year was full of more movies, games, and food.  We were at President Trejo's house again the whole day.  It was cool, but hard to just sit around all day and do nothing--   It was cool, though, to watch Fiddler on the Roof :)

It has been way super cold and everyone hates it.  But we are trying to surivive the best we can!  It makes it harder to talk to people on the streets, so we try to talk to them more on the bus and in stores and stuff.  We still search for those people who are waiting for the gospel!!  Trying to do our best-- I know that they are waiting, but God has a special time and place for us to meet them.  I pray that He will guide us to those places that we need to be in the time that we need to!  In the meantime, we try to strengthen those members that we have.

I love those members of the church who have a true desire to do the Lord's will.  There's this lady here who wants to go to the temple so bad, but she wants to go with her whole family.  Her daughter is inactive and her granddaughter not too long ago got baptized and has started to follow the pattern of her mom.  This lady, Lydmilla, does her very best and is so dedicated.  People like that are such an inspiration to me.  Humble, willing to grow and learn.  Having faith to keep the commandments of God and do what He asks because they know that it's the best for them to do.  Having faith that Heavenly Father will take care of them if they do.  I know that if we put God first in our lives, everything else, in all spheres of our lives, will work out for our good.  Don't ever slack living the gospel to its fullest.  It's way easy to go down that path, and so much harder to return to the right path.

I hope that you will all have a wonderful week this next week!  I hope that you all made New Year's resolutions!  Goals are great!  I didn't realize that before I went on my mission.

Mom- thanks for your love.  :)  All is the same still.... we'll see what happens!
I'm so proud of you for all the improvements you're trying to do in your life.  :)  I am also trying to eat better!  Haha- I actually wrote myself a bunch of little notes to remind myself and posted them in the house.  My companion asked myself what the words mean written on them and it's funny to explain.  I hope you find some sort of funny/amusing thing every day to make you happy.  Prayer works wonders, and I totally realized that reading scriptures is such a stress-reliever.  It might sound cliche, but it works so well !! I love you so much!!  You are amazing!!!  :) :)

Dad-  My comp liked the food you gave me, thanks!  I think on the front of our shirts are just a map and angel moroni.... I don't remember.  :)  We actually stayed home and cleaned on 31 of Jan... FUN!!  But now our apt is all clean!  Yay!  Do you have a little heater?  Maybe you could bring that to work?  Hope you have a great week!  I love you!!!!  you're so super great!!

Much love from Siberia...

Sister Reed :)

 hello hello everyone!!  

I was super happy to talk to you guys on Christmas!  Too bad the time goes by so fast.  And I don't have too much new things to say.....

Christmas ended up super great!  We went to President Trejo's house and ate a delicious lunch of chicken, ham, potatoes, fruit salad, all the good stuff! And we watched Home Alone!!!  Best ever!  :)  Then after 4 o'clock pm, we went out and went to work.  We visited a couple members and celebrated with them a bit.  It was fun.  :)

Sasha was baptized on Sunday, and everything went great!  She was running all around the branch in her jumpsuit before the baptism and being an excited little girl. We had the baptism right after church, so most of the members were able to stay.   It was great!

It has been SOOOO cold these past couple of days!  Even my huge coat didn't cut it yesterday... the coldness was cutting right through.  The winter is fearce! (sp?)  You know it's cold when you walk out the door and cough from taking the first breath of icy air and then instantly come to the realization that you have nose hairs.  Intense!

Sounds like you guys had a good Christmas!  I'm glad that you were all able to be together!  That's hilarious about the broccoli man!!  It's funny that we all forget about it and then quickly remember when he shows up at the gift exchange every year!  Hope that you all have a good New Years!  It's pretty big here, but we will be  inside cleaning our apartment like last year... wahoo.. haha!

Mom- Thanks for the e-mail!  Glad that you had a special experience at church.  That's really cool.  It's always really neat when people try to do something different for lessons to make them more spiritual.  I love you!!!

Dad- Sounds like you have been having a great time with everyone home!  Things with Andrei are... frustrating for me. I hope we switch him over to the elders soon because I don't always have patience for him!  Haha. You're so funny about the mole thing.  Of course none of us will ever forget  that.  :)  I love you!!

Well, I hope that you all have a wonderful week!  Thanks, Grandma Judy, for the e-mail!!  I love you very much and am excited to spend time with you in a little while!

Love you all!

Love,
Sister Reed  :)

Hey!!  WOW!  I really felt loved today with all the letters!  It was great to hear from everyone- Mom and Dad, Grandma Judy, Tia, Heather, Ashley and Clay :), Dayton, Grandma and Grandpa Harr.  THANK YOU!!!  :)  You are all so great!  I'm really always glad to be updated on your lives, and I'm glad that all is well with each of you!  :)

Thanks everyone for sharing the Chrstmas spirit with me!  I will miss you a lot on Christmas, but I will be so happy to be here for the last Christmas on my mission.  I love the spirit the season brings, and the extra excuses to talk about our Savior, Jesus Christ.  I would like to share my testimony that I know that He LIVES!  He is our redeemer, and it is only through Him that we can return to live with our Heavenly Father for eternity.  We should not delay a moment to come unto Him, know more of Him, follow His perfect example of love and obedience.  He prepared the way, and it is our privilege and blessing to follow it.  Please remember the meaning behind the holiday this year.  Christ is the reason.  This is His Birthday, after all.  Think to yourselves: What kind of gift can I give Jesus Christ this year?  Let's make this the most memorable Christmas ever.  :)

So it's been another interesting week!  It has been FREEZNG lately (-30 degrees celcius during the day) as you can tell from the pictures.  But that doesn't keep us down!  We've been working still with Sasha, and she is pretty ready to get baptized on Sunday!  Things have slowed down a bit with Masha- she hasn't been able to meet lately.  And things are moving along with Andrei... he finally talked to us a lot more this last tme!  It was cool- he's beginning to trust us more.  Soon we will switch him over to the elders... we figure it would probably just work better that way.  :)

We had a way cool Christmas party here last week.  I will have to send pics later.  The little kids put on a skit of the nativity and we sang in a choir.  It was neat.  :)  The kids were way cute!  :)

Congratulations to everyone who has received mission calls lately!!!  That is soooooo cool!!!!  Lots of peeps going to Brazil!!  Everyone will be speaking Spanish at the family reunions!  Haha!  But way awesome news!!  Missions are the best ever!!

Mom- Everything sounds great, thanks!!!  You are AMAZING!!!!  I'll be very excited to talk to you in a few days!!  Maybe have some questions ready or somethin you want to talk about, ok?  That way we won't be sitting in that awkward silence.  haha!  Glad that you're feeling well these days.  :)  I love you!!  Talk to you soon!  :):)

Dad- I have a while to talk, so it'll be cool.  I will wait and not get too panicked if you don't call right away.  :)  It would be cool too if you had something you wanted to talk about... maybe get some ideas going.  :)  Yeah we have a subway in Novo. I had to think about what you were talking about-- the restaurant or what-- because we always call the subway "metro."  haha.  Confusion.  I love you and am excited to hear from you soon!!!  :)
oh and that one time you wrote in Russian, I didn't fully get it.  :)  What does it mean?

 с любовью,
сестра Рид :)

Heeeeere's Johnny!....
Name that.

Hey fam!  Thanks Mom and Dad and Shon and Blayre :) for the e-mails!!
Cool that you got the Christmas card!  that was fun taking those pics for it!

This week has been a growing week.  Lots of testing and growing.  I'm trying to love Novosibirsk- haha- it's been a struggle.  I know that I said that about Barnaul, too, so I hope that it becomes home for me.  It is just SO BIG!  But we've really been blessed with new investigators almost every week.

This week we were at a member's house, and they invited their son to be on the meeting with us.  He's about 25ish I'd guess, and he's kinda the... I'm too cool for this kind of stuff... kinda guy.  Kinda like... why should this matter to me?...     But from his questions and stuff, we ended up teaching him about the plan of salvation.  He was still kinda 50/50 about the whole thing, but we came back again a second time, and he was on the meeting again.  We talked about Jesus Christ and what kind of role He plays in our lives.  This guy's name is Andrei, and he's really pretty closed.  But we hope that more and more he will open up to us.  He comes into the room and stays when we have meetings, so that's a good sign!

We also met with Masha again and taught her about the plan of salvation.  She was really interested and it was a cool meeting.  :)
Sasha is doing pretty good- still excited to get baptized!

So life is pretty good!  Glad to hear that all os okay for the most part at home!    

To answer Dad's questions-
Yes, my comp does a really great job on the meetings.  She's great.  I haven't really been offered anything super weird to eat on my mission ever.... just maybe liver, but it was fried, so it wasn't too bad!  And fish, but that's not weird; I just don't like it.  :) yes, I teach 1st group in english and it's pretty fun.  The people are way cool there.  The groups are a ton bigger, too!  So it's cool. :)
 And yes, dad, I'll try to take more pics.  :)  I trust in your advice.  :)  crazy about your crazy rain!  Hope it doesn't flood there!  :)

Mom- You look way good!  (thanks Dad for the pic! :) )  Excited to see ya all different-like!  :)

I love you all very much and I hope you have a marvelous week!  Sorry this is a lame e-mail.  I'll try to do better next time!

The church is true!  :)

Love,
Sister Reed :)