Tuesday, January 22, 2013

January 21






Hey mom!
Sorry I couldn’t write yesterday but our mission president lets us email the next day if the libraries are closed for whatever reason :) oh by the way rumor has it the price for postage is going up $0.01 Jan. 27.... guess I'm going to have to go buy a bunch of 1 cent stamps to go put on my letters haha thats annoying. Well Life in Tennessee is awesome the Tennessee-ism for the week is extraterrestrium. 
Exteraterrestrium: southern for extraterrestrial, or alien. Buster: "Those crazies think Adam and Eve were cooked up and put here by extraterrestriums to use us as natural resources!" hahaha I love the south! Anywho.. 
Things have been going really great here we had 4 investigators at church this week, and the bishop told us we are setting records in the farragut ward.  I can't figure it out, I don’t feel like Elder Christensen and I are particularly exceptional missionaries at this point, we are both still fairly young in our missions, and yet the lord is blessing us and making up the difference for our hard work and putting our whole heart into the work. Its really incredible, the lord really lets you know he is out there looking out for you, thats for sure.
Our investigators are all really doing awesome. We are going to go see Dwight and Jane S in a few minuets here, and we are going to share a really spiritual lesson on personal revelation and are going to commit them to pray to know that Jesus Christ is their Savior and feeling the spirit on their own, so when we go over next time to have them pray about the book of mormon they will have a feeling to "benchmark" the feeling they are going to get when they ask if the Book of Mormon is the inspired word of God. They are super awesome, they have us over for dinner and lunch all the time, we help them move furniture and stuff (Dad its true Bakker's move furniture once a month if not more their whole life... haha) and they are going to be writing you guys a letter i guess haha we really love them.  
We also had a pretty interesting experience with a Chinese guy named John. We were teaching Matt G here at the library the other day and some random guy named John came up to us, speaking half Chinese half english, saying every time he has an important decision to make in his life and every time he "sees a sign" or anything like that he sees two mormon missionaries. He came up to us and straight up asked us if he should quit his job and move to south dakota to finish school and if he should pay for it on his credit card or not.... haha we told him to pray and we called him later to talk about it and we had a 25 min conversation with him on the phone and he was speaking about 75% Chinese and long story short he prayed and something opened up for him and he can get a scholarship to some college out there. he called us the next day or so and said he was getting kicked out of his place and we went over the next morning at 7am to help him move out, it was so sketchy ha he was living in some rich houses living room and we packed his car up and he was off for south dakota. He was already a member of the church but through this experience he decided he was going to start going back to church and stop drinking coffee. The whole thing was so bizarre i can't adequately describe it to you in words... haha you just had to be there. 
Also we have 12 people we have invited to be at church this week so prayers from home would be awesome if you guys could help prayer for them to make it to church. The ward would go crazy with missionary work if we had a huge turn out like that, it would be amazing! Oh also it totally snowed this week!!! we got 2 inches!!!! hahaha it melted over night and there was no snow the next day but everyone was off work and school anyways haha the streets were deserted so naturally we went tracting! we caught a family home and found some new investigators! 
Also Dad, question, how did you help people quit smoking on your mission? we have an investigator, Maria, who has a firm testimony and wants to be baptized but has to quit smoking. any help on that would be stellar! also I'll be sending home a package of stuff some time in the next few weeks just so i don’t have to carry it around on my mission. As always I pray for you and love you! oh and before I jet, I cant remember if I told you I tracted into a house with a pet monkey the other day... anyways ha love ya
Love Elder Bakker
PS the Kroquets were ABSOLUTELY RAD! ha not a single one broke open! haha how'd ya pull that off?! ha i bought some fresh rolls and ghuda to go with it along with my mustard from Brother L! everything was perfect except the thermometer broke in shipping, but i bought one from the grocery store for like 5$ that worked so its all good!

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