March 18

March 18, 2013

hey madre and fam

The work here is wonderful. Tennessee-ism for the week is Maryville, which is a city here in Knoxville. (now say it in your head) you pronounced is like mary-ville. Yup you're not from the south. The correct way to pronounce it is murrvull. Haha well like I said all is well here across the country!

Sad to see Elder Christensen go, but Elder Arnold is awesome, he hails from San Diego and even played a year or two of water polo, so that’s cool. If there was a mission wide water polo tournament our district would win, my district leader played in cali too, and I believe that’s everyone in the whole mission who played.

Well anyways there’s not a whole lot more changing around here. We are really locking arms with the members and striving to be better missionaries together with the ward and they are pretty excited for it. Almost every family in the ward has a couple, if not more, families they are working with in helping share the gospel with them. We even got to meet one family this week that was found by a family in the ward from the ask in faith program. The P family, and they invited us to dinner.

Kind of a cool story there in the making. We were out tracting and offering blessings on peoples homes and we decided that the street we were on was the wrong street, but we felt like we shouldn't move on quite yet, so we knocked on a few more houses, got told off by a couple people and decided well I guess now its time to leave. So we hopped on our bikes and felt like we should go the long way back to the apartment and I felt like, hey we need to set up an appointment with the B family so we can go over their "Ask in Faith" program with them a little more. So we rode up their drive way and who should be playing basketball in their drive way? The P family, who we've been trying to meet with along with the B's forever. They said that the B family would be back shortly they just went to pick something up from the store. We chatted for a little bit and they invited us to dinner! ha the Lords hand is in his holy work. We are meeting with the B family tonight and Wednesday to talk about what we can do for the P's and next week I believe we will meet with the P's for dinner.

Little miracles that help you know that the Lord is intimately involved in our lives. He has a plan for all of us, and we have to have the faith that if we can follow the spirit and do the right thing he will in fact lead us in the way that is right for us. It may not seem right at first (ex: getting cussed off a porch) but the destination is where you want to end up (meeting the P's at the perfect time). I love the mission and don’t ever want to leave the people of Farragut haha even though I'll probably get booted end of April. Love you, and it's real simple. One of the most common (if not the most common) promise in the Book of Mormon is for the first time found in 1 Nephi 2:20 "And inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper..." until next time.

Love you,

Elder Bakker