April 30, 2012

dear fam,

There’s zero extra time to day and it will be a short email.  We are traveling down to the cities today for a zone leader conference and won’t get back till Thursday night. If it seems a little scatter brained, it is . . . there’s been a crunch of information and not a lot of sleep the last few days figuring some things out, like in bed at 1 am and up at 5 am crazy stuff :) but it’s been a good week!

Some pe classes, like swimming would be nice but other than that I’m chill with whatever, work your magic mom :)  (He’s trying to get registered for some classes in the Fall and not having much luck)

 I’ll be glad to work, I’m not sure what the valet job that Mitch is doing, is it like driving a limo?  (not exactly, more like just parking cars and running a lot!)

I’ve only done the off the cuff once down in Rochester, thank goodness.

Funny story about jAnn. last week I wrote in my notes to write her. I looked on the calendar to see if anything was happening like bday or anniversary.. nothing but I still wrote to her. mmmhhmm glad I did

Great week, we set a date with one of our investigators, it was awesome. The zone is doing well and it seems that whenever Elder Watkins and I are having a good week teaching and finding, the rest of the zone follows… more pressure.

Also had some interesting experiences. A couple that was investigating, disappeared into thin air. Bishop saw them out walking around down town and told us about it. We tried going down to see what we could do... nothing.  Finally we prayed about a day and time we should go. well it came, we were having lunch and got the impression to leave NOW. Off we went and 45 minutes later found them :) it’s not the easiest thing finding a homeless person but with the Lord on our side, I believe it was much easier.

 We got 8 new investigators and 12 investigator lessons, both exceeding the standard of excellence. There’s about 4 or 5 teams in the mission that hit that and this week we were one of them. We actually had 2 come from the zone.

One of the investigators we have, has a glass eye. I asked him to pop it out for me but he said it’s like having contacts but you have to be a lot more careful with it, he said some day. It made me excited, I’ve never seen a glass eye before, or at least I don’t remember.  (Really, and why would you want to?)

Thursday, Friday and Saturday we were at the church for about 5 hours each day. Thursday was weekly planning. Friday was zone conference, that went really well. We talked a little bit about etiquette  at the dinner table. Some of the elders ( there’s no sisters in the zone :) had never talked or learned anything about etiquette at dinner table. I was really thankful for dad and for Mrs. foster for helping me out there … never thought it would come in hand but hey look at that.  Saturday was an open house, a great turn out, about 45 nonmembers came. We had 4 investigators come, all of them had never come to church before and said they would enjoy it sometime, but no luck the following Sunday.  This upcoming Sunday should be much better. We average about 2 investigators to church a week.

It was a solid week with a lot of miracles and spiritual moments, what a blessing. Another blessing was being able to stay in our area the whole week. It’s amazing what can be done when both missionaries are on the same page of obedience and consecration, it’s a wonderful experience that not a lot of missionaries get.

I was able to see Elder Katoa and Pederson at zone conference. It was good to see them both. Next week I should be able to up load some pictures. We have had some Kodak moments.

I love you all

elder baker