Shout Out to Lewis

Kinfolk,

Shout out to Alyssa and Bren Durfee for having a kid. Welcome to the world Lew.

Things are good here! Tender mercies are everywhere!

Last Sunday we had a random person walk into the Don Mills chapel and stay for all three hours. He is pretty new to Canada and has been attending the English class there as well. But anyways we taught our boy the restoration on Sunday and he was LOVING IT. He just at it up. Elder Dixon was on exchange on Saturday when he wanted to meet again and they talked about his Book of Mormon reading and his understanding/questions thus far. Turns out he read a huge chunk of 1 Nephi and had a solid understanding. Then they taught the plan of salvation and he absolutely loved it and was so impressed by how much it makes sense compared to others beliefs. He thought it really showed the mercy and love of God.

That same day 3 Iranian friends came to English class and also became new investigators. BLESSED.

The Final Tender mercy we saw was when another man came church. A sister member met him playing Pickle ball a few weeks back and decided to invite him to church. He is a Chemical Engineer and is awesome. We were able to share the Book of Mormon with him and set a little meeting to see him on Thursday. In case you were curious, he is A1.

The lord has been blessing us.

His hand is present.

Have a great week!
--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر



Shout our to Toronto sunsets

Tim Hortons Coming in the Clutch

HELLO

Everything is good here. Just another week of skype teaching, meetings and whatnot.

Just a quick shout out to the Cleveland Ohio Mission and my sis Dani, we are now teaching a sister there!

Some goodies that happened this week was on exchange! We didn't find any new investigators or anything but I had a great time with Elders Auerbach and Brown, the youngest Farsi missionaries. We were able to go around contacting and checking out some Persian book stores and trying to slide in our message with their owners. Unfortunately they weren't having it. But since I hadn't had lunch yet I asked to stop at the gas station and they had a Tim Hortons inside (typical Canada) so I shot some Farsi with the ladies and they ended up giving us 4 free pastries :) yeeeeeees

We also had a great experience with a member and her friend. She brought a friend of hers and was kinda getting on us to help him with all of his temporal problems and was saying "he will be baptized next week, then he can get help from the church." If you didn't know, we don't do that. But we talked to him more and found his deep love for his family, and how he misses them as they were recently taken from him by his ex wife. We were able to talk to him more about the gospel and we are going to be meeting with him this week :).

We had another 2 miracles on Sunday, we had a potential investigator come to Brampton Ward, and another man walk into Don Mills ward!! Both are excited about the gospel and are excited to meet with us this week!

We ended the week by having an open fire pit barbecue with a member and enjoyed some good Jujeh Kabab.

Hope you all have a good week!
--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر

FSU D1 ball and the Antichrist

Hey Fam, how goes?

Happy Memorial Day to all. Eat some good BBQ for me.

Weeks seem to be flying by and its a hard realization that I won't be here forever. But we have been making the most out of it and have been having a good time!
Some cool experiences for ya:
We met with an investigator of ours who is atheist, and every time we bring him up to our ward mission leader he calls him the Antichrist, but this was Elders Dixons first time meeting him and in the past we have joked about reading Alma 30 with him about Korihor. So we get there and it turns out that we actually used that scripture with him... as we were reading what Korihor taught, he was super supportive and sympathizing with him, he thinks what Korihor taught is exactly right.... so basically without going into a huge amount of detail, our Ward mission leader wasn't to far off when calling him Antichrist.... yikes

But on the bright side we also met a kid that was landscaping our church and he was 6' 7" getting ready to play D1 basketball at FSU. So there ya go.

And we also contacted a couple more G-Wagons and Maseratis in the church parking lot. Another summer day in Toronto.

Hope you all have a good week
--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر

Turkish Blessin's - Plain Banksy

Hey Fam,
Also happy Victoria Day, I hope you all celebrated.

Well things are good, Elder Dixon and I are having a blast. Suns out, guns out amiright?

Well we have been hitting the pavement pretty good the last little bit and have been blessed to teach some great people.

Had a super weird day on Saturday.... I was on Exchange with Elder Heppler and we had a stellar day planned. 3 lessons, service for a member and all. But as the day went on, every one of those things fell through by 3 o'clock, hahaha typical. So we ended up going home to finish up our studies... mid prayer I remembered that some random guy in Turkey got our number from another person that I met on the street some 4 odd weeks ago and said that he needs to be sponsored to come to Canada... another typical situation. But I decided to shoot him a message anyways and he said he could Skype in 5 minutes. Yikes. So we hustled our behinds to the church and Skyped him. We had talked for like 5 minutes when he basically said "so you gonna help more or not?" and like so many times in the past I had to decline, but he asked which kind of Christians we were if we aren't Catholic or Protestant. BINGO ha we then had a good 40 minute restoration lesson and he downloaded the gospel library app, committed to read, and committed to go to church which is 3 HOURS from where he lives. God is good.

Also, Banksy is coming to town. I'll let you all know who he actually is when I meet him.

Stay tuned.
--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر

Plains of Toronto

Mums Day Shout Out

Happy Moms Day to my Mom, Grandma Peterson, and Grandma Bakker!

All is good here,
Super good to talk to you all last night! Glad everyone is doing good!

I am officially back in action with Elder Dixon! By the end of this transfer, over a quarter of my mission will have been spent with this guy haha.

Last tuesday we had a pretty sweet miracle! We went to our English class and no Persians showed up unfortunately, but at the end the church phone rang and some guy on the other end told me that he wants to come to church. I talked to him a bit and turns out the he is from "Persia"! We met with him and he basically laid out a spiritual out of body experience that he had, he told the police about it earlier this week and they basically just told him to go to a church and find a Father or Priest. So he googled "church near me" and found our phone number. We have met with him now and he is super keen on living the Gospel of Jesus Christ! He wants to be baptized! Woohoo! And the cherry on top, He was born in DALLAS. Amen to teaching American citizens, no permanent resident worry at all.

We were also invited over to a Persian member's home for dinner, this time she fed us some A1 qorme sabzi. It was good stuff! So shout out to her for hooking us up.

The rest of the week we had a couple meet ups with other investigators. Same old same old, the work is good!
--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر

Kyle Lowry and Southern Lovin

Pretty nutty week,

Southern Lovin is a reference to me staying in Farsi South...., AGAIN ha this will be my 9th transfer here! And I'll be serving with one of my previous companions, Elder Dixon!

Started off with Tuesday night when we went to ESL. We pulled up a bit early and idk why but our church parking lot is notorious for loitering, not by kids or anything but by super rich people that like to park their G wagons, Bentleys, Royces, you name it. So this time we roll up and there is this massive 14 passenger van (Mercedes Sprinter) that was blacked out, tinted windows, black rims, everything. So we just thought it was some goober loitering and we didn't pay much attention to it, so we went inside and came back out to take the trash to the dumpster and I saw the guy in the front seat just chilling and reading a book so I decided to talk to him and see whats up. I started off the conversation asking about his van and he says "oh ya its nice, but its not mine. It's KYLE LOWRY'S." My jaw just dropped and I'm like you're kidding right and he just says nope, I'm his body guard, Robin. I about lost my crap and he is like here let me show you inside. So he gets out and opens up the door and lets us go in and sit in his van, heat/cooling seats, flat screen TV, all Leather. goodness, I know I'm not supposed to focus on that kind of stuff but it was niiiiiiice. Then he casually said "ok, well I have to go pick up his wife and kid. I have to take them downtown for the first game against the Cavs." Wow. what an experience.

Earlier in the week, an elder bought our entire zone all you can eat sushi as well, so idk what's going on but I've been spoiled.

Our mission was also very blessed to have President Ballard, Elder Gay and Elder Homer come to our mission. Leading up to their visit we had a challenge as a mission to talk to 5,000 people in 4 days, we succeeded with 5,333 and it was a bunch of fun.

My Companionship didn't have a lot of time to go contacting this week so on Friday we set aside 2 hours to go to Yonge Street and talk to literally every person we could. So we did and it was nuts hahahaha During this window of time was crazy storm, winds were clocked at like 110 km/h and a rainstorm hit that flooded the street in like 5 minutes.  The rain cleared and we kept contacting and we ended up talking to 102 people. Good stuff, we had a guy tell us he was Jesus, said a prayer with a guy from Cairo, saved an old man from the wind (he was holding onto a pole so he wouldn't blow away), saw pretty much every advertisement on the road break and fly into the traffic, saw another sign fall and puncture a hole into the hood of a Mercedes right in front of us. It was nuts. The whole city lost power for couple hours and all the stoplights were out for about 3 days.

Elder Ballard then came in and basically told us that work is the key to success, big surprise there, but hearing it from an apostle hit us all from a different angle. It was great, President Ballard shook my hand and looked straight into my sole. He is an Apostle of the Lord.

love you all!

--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر

Bass Pro Shop

Morning Folks!

How goes things?

Things are good here! It's the last week of the transfer and its warm! 7 months of winter is a drag. seriously. But things are going good! We have been enjoying the weather.

This week was a bunch of exchanges and meetings for us so I just give a quick rundown on the goodies:

Mission Leadership Conference
We had our MLC meeting on Wednesday and it's very likely that 6+ of the 20 Zone Leaders won't be zone leaders next transfer.... too bad. The reason is is that 10/20 of them go home with me in the coming months, so president is putting us in other areas to help those areas. but since we all know it was likely going to be our last hurrah together we decided to take a picture with all our Bass Pro Shop hats (another joke from the MLC elders), our mission vehicle coordinator took the picture and said "none of you are smiling, do you know what makes me smile? my favorite store, BASS PRO SHOP" then we all whipped out our hats and President and Sister Shields were just like "wait whats going on?!". it sounds a lot more lame when I type it out but I promise it was funny.

We then went on exchange with Elder Johnson and Elder Cruz. Elder Johnson came to our area with me and Elder Auerbach and we decided to contact Ryerson university. The University is right on Dundas Square (Toronto Times Square) on a Friday... not our best idea. It was seriously so crowded that it was almost impossible to contact people... There was a guy trying to anti us with "Manufactured Terrorism by the government", idk he was nuts.... and while that was going on there was another guy juggling fire while standing on a 10 foot pole..... should have taken a picture but there was too much going on and I didn't get the chance.... sorry....

Those are the main highlights of the week, the only other good thing is that we have finally gotten our eternigator to come to church! If you were reading my emails about a year ago, I talked about an investigator that "Loves being Burned" and couldn't come to church because he plays tennis on Sundays, he is a very wealthy and well off man. But he has been to church that last 2 Sundays and will be coming to see President Ballard speak this week! 1 year later and a lot of progress made. woo hoo!

Thanks for tuning in,

Have a good week!

--

Elder Jack Bakker
ارشد جک باکر