Dec 2

Hey y'all!

Great week and happy December!  Thanksgiving was awesome! We went to dinner with some members that we are really close to and also went to the church for a dinner that a few families put on for people in need and people who don’t have a place to go for Thanksgiving. It was great! There was all kinds of food, we deep fried a turkey and one of the members brought one that was entirely wrapped in bacon! We also got to play in the annual turkey bowl this year which was great, we missionaries who don’t get to play sports like that too often were sore for days but it was totally worth it.

We have been teaching a members girlfriend named Sarah lately and she is awesome I may have told you about her last week... I don't remember. But she is great, we are hoping to commit her for baptism this week or next. It's been really difficult for us to find any new investigators lately but there is the parade coming up! Wartburg is in our area and we have like 2 active families up there so it is hard to find new people to teach understandably. The ward decided to enter a float in the Oak Ridge parade this year because of a little extra money in the budget, so we also decided to put in the Wartburg parade this weekend! We are going to be walking with it and handing out bracelets that link you to a twitter page the youth in the ward made #webelieveinChrist , and custom pass-along cards/fliers that have our phone number on it and other info! We are praying for some new investigators from this and we hope that a miracle will come out of it! well thanks for everything! hope all is well!

Love Elder R.A. Bakker

Nov 25

Hey Mom,

Little Dutch Boy Cookies in Tennessee

For thanksgiving we are going to the church for a group thanksgiving dinner kind of thing hopefully another members house or two as well. Oh and the turkey bowl in the frigid morning. Well it's a new transfer with new goals and plans and a reinforced vision to baptize! The new companion is elder Williams from Pocatello, Idaho. He is awesome, pretty quiet guy but quite funny and very motivated. We are really working with our zone on finding and then teaching our investigators the most important thing so they then have a real desire to be baptized. We are really trying hard to lead by example and find, teach, and baptize ourselves.

Andrew, E Scouten, Cody, E Russo

On that note Ill talk about Maria. She hasn’t been to church now two weeks in a row. We are working really hard to help apply the "balm of Gilead" in her life. In order for her to be ready for the sacred covenant of baptism we are going to postpone her date for the time being until we feel she is truly ready for that step. She is very sweet and really doing her best to prepare. We were able to teach her this week with Sister K a sister from the ward who is an LDS family and clinical psychologist. She was able to help us get a better idea on how to help her and where she is at emotionally. The World can really do some damage on people that can't or don't know how to utilize the atonement.

E Russo, E Williams, Andrew

There is an over arching theme among many southerners of "I have already been saved, and Jesus took my sins away." That's all good but it really shows how much they just don't understand. That faith is only a piece of the picture and with out the whole restored gospel of Jesus Christ it salvation will never come to fruition. Our purpose as a missionary is to invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and his atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the holy ghost and enduring to the end. With out that whole cycle, you are on the wrong road and can't partake of the fruit of the tree of life. We were able to teach this to a less active teenager who is thinking about a mission and his nonmember girlfriend yesterday and it was awesome. Alex and Sarah. They are great I really think we can help him get ready for a mission and help her enter in "by the gate." I feel if we all really understood the gospel of Jesus Christ, like really understood we would never sin. Proverbs 6:32 " But whoso comitteth [adultery with a woman] lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul." Or [sin]. I hope and pray that we can all be grateful for the supreme blessing of the gospel in our lives this holiday season. I love you all and hope all is well!  

Love Elder RA Bakker

Nov 18

Hey family!

Well, transfer call came Saturday and it looks like Elder Russo and I are staying here and Elder Schouten is off to be a zone leader in Maryville (pronounced murrvol). So we will be getting a new companion, a brand new zone leader President has asked me to train up.  New transfers are great because it gives us an opportunity to reevaluate our vision and goals so that we can grow and be more effective, even though we will miss Elder Schouten it'll be a real treat. Should be a good transfer.

Maria is doing well she has a baptismal date for December 7th (happy Pearl Harbor day...) She has had the hardest time understanding and really getting the gospel so we have taught her over and over as simply as we can and she really is finally starting to figure it all out. She came with us to the addiction recovery class this week and loved it. She told me the other day that if she wants to continue seeing these positive changes in her life she has to put forth the effort. So she has been reading the scriptures and working through the addiction recovery workbook on her own. She really is a sweet daughter of God. I have been able to see a bitter, scared and scarred woman turn into a happy and open individual through the atonement of Jesus Christ. The pain and grief of her past is being washed clean through the blood of the lamb. She really makes me happy. 

We have been blessed out here with people like Cody and Maria to teach. We have a really hard time finding people to teach because we live about 10 miles or so from our area and there are only like 5 active members in our whole area and its humungous with very few people... However like I said if we do our best the Lord continues to bless us.

All is well out here! Love you! sorry for the short time to email!

Love Elder R.A. Bakker 

Nov 11

Hey Mom!

All is well out here! Transfers are coming up on the 20th so a week and a half and there's probably going to be a change of some kind. Elder Schouten goes home in 2 transfers so that is weird, who knows what will happen to us. There's a lot that has been learned here so by next week I'll know what's happening right now anything could happen.

little possum friend at zone conference  

As far as my week goes it was pretty good a little different. We had a zone conference training to prepare for Thursday, so we naturally were putting it off till Tuesday and Wednesday to flesh it all out and it was last Monday afternoon around 2:00, when we get a call from the assistants and they said "hey Elder Schouten and Elder Bakker is your training ready for zone conference?" we were all uh... no haha and they said "well can it be ready to present at mission leadership council tomorrow at 2:00?" .... haha we didnt have anything done for it except a few thoughts we had the week before. We accepted and that night spent hours creating this training and miracle after miracle helped us to pull it all together with a 24 hour notice to have it presented. We had an Idea for a piñata and thought hmm… piñatas are like $20... so we went to check it out to see if it was affordable to use for our training and Kmart is having a clearance and practically begged us to take these two big yellow truck piñatas for $2 a piece... Ha like that happens everyday. 

The training was great! We gave an wonderful training on goal setting and "the most important thing" or your purpose as a missionary and for our demonstration before we did the role play we had a piñata to demonstrate how if we don’t have a "vision" of want we are to achieve then we can't hit our target. It was fantastic! The lord helped us really prepare for the training and I have never had preparation or presentation of a training go so smoothly! Keep your eyes on the prize!

Love ya! Elder R.A. Bakker

Nov 4

Hey everyone!

The winter hasn't really hit here yet and the fall was kind of weak but that's ok the weather is still nice and we haven't had to layer up too much yet actually just a jacket here and there.

Well, Halloween has come and gone we weren't really allowed to do much proselyting on Halloween so we studied at the church and made candied bacon and hires root beer! great time! One of the member families stopped by to pick something up and they talked us into trying this pepper that one of the other elders had.... big mistake haha! It was a ghost pepper which is the second hottest pepper in the world aka the Bhut jolokia pepper... google it... it set us on fire for nearly an hour and we ate the smallest bite. So that was basically our Halloween, a lot of screaming and ice cream and washing the eyes out of elder arnold who decided to rub his eyes after partaking...  

We have a lot of fun serving here together. There's always a lot of stress that comes with missionary work but the good times always out weigh the hard times and you always are learning and becoming more like the savior day by day. We are pretty low on investigators right now, but our hope and faith is high that the lord will help us to find those that are prepared. Maria is progressing very slowly, her traumatic childhood and life up to this point prevents her from learning concepts quickly so we have to be patient and help introduce the atonement in her life one step at a time. She will get there. We also are preparing a training this week for our zone conference. We are training on how goals help us o focus our sights on the most important thing. Pray for us! we are going to need it. We had a meeting with president irion and the stake presidency yesterday a meeting with the missionary higher leadership tomorrow and zone conf on thursday... meeting after meeting after meeting... haha gotta love it. Love you and remember to focus your sights on the most important things!

Good better best!

Love,

 Elder R.A. Bakker

Multi Zone conference with Elder Corbridge