July 14

Hey!

Great week this week! We did a lot of traveling, we only slept at our apartment 2 days the last 7 days, every other day we were on the road staying with other Zone Leaders. We attended 5 zone training meetings this week and 4 last week. Pretty fun, I not only gave another on the spot 20 minute training, but the zone leaders stole our training we gave at mission leadership training so I had to write a new one from scratch during the meeting. It was kind of fun actually, the missionaries really seemed to enjoy it, I trained on "Becoming a Master Teacher." - I love it. So that was pretty good. I'm as tired as all get out from all these meetings. I was able to spend quite a bit of time with the Griffins this week especially, the youngest, she is like my baby sister. We played a lot of "princess pet shop" while I was timing and rotating missionaries out for interviews in the hallway during the meetings, the sisters in the mission tell me that I will make a great dad and that this is "good training" for me. The Griffin girls are all a lot of fun and and Elder Mumm and I have been adopted into the family. We even had Sunday dinner over there tonight and are having ableskivers for breakfast in the morning. YUM! 

For our investigators this week we were only able to see two of them. Chris was at church today and we had a great lesson with him and are anticipating his baptismal date of Aug 23rd. The other investigator was a kid named Andrew. He is kind of an interesting guy, but very intelligent and quite interested in the church. We are looking forward to several lessons this upcoming week with other investigators. 

Hmm other random things of the week. I broke a sisters hand in a zone activity game... that was rough. She seems to be doing ok though considering, and isn't too mad at me, apparently I owe her Panda Express (a Southern delicacy that you can find in Farragut) so maybe that will alleviate some of the hard feelings. And I can officially dunk a basketball again. I could a little bit at the beginning of my mission, but I'm getting back into shape a bit so basketball is way better now. I'm coming for ya in October Jack.

Life is good, time is moving fast, busy as a bee, being blessed, and loving every minute.

Love ya 

Elder R.A. Bakker