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

Oct 28

The work continues. Another week comes and goes, time flies I can't hardly keep track of the day or even month it is. My year mark has come and gone and Halloween is right around the corner, I spent the last one in the MTC. The Highlight for the week was definitely getting to go see Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge of the 70 come and speak to the mission on Tuesday. He came and toured our mission and spoke to us for several hours about "The Most Important Thing." It was great. He spoke for quite a log time and it was hard to take everything in all at once but upon further study and light of understanding by the Spirit I finally feel like I really have a good grasp on it. He started off by letting us know that in the last 2 thousand years and in the next 2 thousand years there is nothing that has been or could be said that is of more importance than his message. This is it and you can truly base your whole life on this principle. 

  Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ we can be cleansed of sin and endowed with God's power from on high so that we can qualify for eternal life and exhalation if we have faith in Jesus Christ, repent of our sins, are baptized for the remission of sins by one having authority (and renew our covenants weekly), receive the gift of the holy ghost (and remain worthy of that gift, and endure to the end. 

Essentially it is three fold.

1. What we should most desire to receive - To qualify for eternal life and exaltation in the world to come and to be endowed with God's power and spirit here in this life as well.

2. How we get there- Faith, Repentance, Baptism (make/renew covenants), Receive the Holy ghost (remain worthy/keep covenants), and enduring to the end. 

3. How it's possible- The infinite and all reaching power of Christ's Atonement.

We as God's servants are to achieve accomplish these things and to help others partake as well. just as Lehi partook of the fruit of the tree of life (the love of god is the tree and the blessings of the atonement are the fruit) then immediately looked around to find his family. We are all apart of the family of God and are charged to partake of the fruit and then help others make it to the tree and partake also. 

E Russo, Andrew and E Schouten P-day at Obed Park in Wartburg TN

I love the Lord and my mission means everything to me. Thanks for all the support and love! 

I love you!

Elder R.A. Bakker 

Oct 20

Zone Conference 10/13

Tennessee is starting to get a bit colder. The Fall is here and you can feel winter coming in close behind it. There is a lot to be grateful for this week. We were able to commit a new investigator for baptism.

For starters the blessings of the time I got to serve in Farragut have been flowing my whole mission, We got a referral from a member in the Knox. stake that I got to know a little bit while I was serving there. His name is Stewart and he found out his friend who he is trying to share the gospel with lives in our area. We got in contact and he brought his friend Steve  out to church last week. We were able to get an appointment with him for this last Thursday. We began to teach him the Restoration and everything was going great! We got to my favorite part, sharing the First Vision. It has become my absolute favorite thing to teach. Elder Russo shared the experience with Steve, and I had the prompting to pull out the restoration pamphlet and show him the picture of the first vision, which is typically a rarity for me to do. But I pulled it out and he looked at the picture and his mouth dropped. The room was swimming with the Spirit. He told us that a while ago he was at a flee market and decided to purchase a wrinkled old piece of art for a dollar for Stewart, he steamed it and it was framed and given to him. He proceeded to tell us that the painting had an eery similarity to the picture in the restoration pamphlet we had just shown him. He then relays a series of experiences from earlier that very day. He is not a man of wealth, in fact he is very poor and he works for Stewart, and Stewart had given him that morning 20$ to put gas in his car. He was driving down the road and he ran out of gas precisely the time that the man in front of him ran out of gas. They pull off the road and Steve remembers the 20$ in his pocket for gas and he gives 5 of it to the other man. In gratitude this "Grizley Adams" (in the words of steve) looking guy gave him in return a painting. (random... who does that right?) Upon closer inspection of the painting Steve notices that the artist is the same one that had done the painting he had given to Stewart, in fact it was the sister painting to it, and they are both the originals. He takes us out to his vehicle and shows us the painting. It was amazing, The Spirit touched his heart, and The lord had prepared him. We committed him for baptism the 16th of November.

I testify that "the field is white already to harvest." And according to our faith, diligence, and obedience and the Lord's will we will be able to find "those that will receive (us)." thanks for everything! Love you!

Love Elder Bakker

Oct 14

Dear mom,

Tennessee is still great! Not much has changed. We were able to go with the assistants to the KNOX-YSA branch yesterday to go confirm Cody a member of the church. He was ecstatic and it was a really cool opportunity to go help with that. As missionaries we really live for those experiences where we get to teach someone who has truly been searching for the Lord's gospel, see it change them from the inside out, and help them make sacred covenants with their Heavenly Father. 

We have been working really hard with our zone to think up and apply new finding ideas. It's been really difficult with our zone mostly being in a more rural part of the mission, there aren't tons and tons of people. So we have to get creative, try new things and have hope and faith that the Lord will help us to increase our teaching pool. We volunteer at a Southern Baptist "Storehouse Ministry"(kind of a version of a bishops storehouse) on wednesdays, and we are searching for more opportunities for us to get into the community for service opportunities as well as other community events to promote the church. We also sweet talked the librarian here in oak ridge to give us a 45 page list of community organizations to try and volunteer other places as well. Do y'all have any new and interesting finding ideas we can try out? Let me know! 

There are a lot of good things happening in the church now. The missionary spirit is spreading like a bug and if you catch it it's contagious. It's The best of times and its the worst of times. We have the greatest amount of truth and righteousness the world has ever seen as well as the  greatest amount of false truths and wickedness. I hope and pray that we all will be more able to see the big picture and have an eternal view of what is to come so that we can be aided in our decisions now and everyday. 

Love you

Love Elder R.A. Bakker