Tuesday, August 27, 2013

I remember how much I wanted to be a missionary, and it's finally happening....


So we had two new missionaries living with us for about five days, and they are already moved out. They are Elder Franco and Elder Olsen; they cover English for the Logan stake (our more southern stake) even though they are both Spanish missionaries. Elder Olsen is waiting for his visa to go to Argentina. They just moved out last night to a nicer apartment across the street. We kept the not so nice one, because I didn't want to pack, and we get free milk sent to our apartment from the dairy in Logan. AANND Elder Coronado moved out so I promoted myself to the queen size bed...living like kings in Logan in Utah.
 
These are those three kids I told you about that I talked to for a long time about disneyland..they have these birds, chinchillas, a shitzu...also I met a lady this week with a malti-poo named Lucky. 
So this week has been awesome. Things are just changing for me generally. It's kind of hard to explain, but mainly it’s my perspective and confidence in the Lord being able to just guide me and tell me how to be a missionary. I'll come back to that, but this week we had kind of a funny dinner appointment.

We called the night before like always and then showed up the next day, and the mom was asleep; she had forgotten. Her kids said sorry, and we said no worries we would eat at home. She called thirty minutes after that when we were eating at home bawling her eyes out asking us to come back and eat with her. We said it was fine, and we didn't have time, but she really wanted to give us money to go out. We said seriously it's fine. She just cried harder and said, "Please come back! I have rejected the servants of God! I’m so sorry!" It was really hard not to laugh; we couldn't figure out why she was being so hard on herself, but we promised to go back for dinner another day, poor lady. I wish our investigators felt that bad about missing appointments.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Well I made it through another transfer!

The Zone


My zone leaders
Elder Salazar and I will both be staying in Montevista and absorbing the other half of the area that was previously covered by another companionship. In the past, for English missionaries there was only one companionship for every two stakes. Through the past couple transfers, our mission has been trying to work towards having one set of missionaries for each stake. So on Sunday, the transfer board was all done then President Hiers went to lunch with Elder Perry who told him that they wanted it done now. President Hiers went straight to the transfer room and changed everything up moving about 80% of missionaries to different areas and white washing a TON. It is a big and exciting change; a lot of stakes will be happy. It will also be more tough for those English missionaries to focus only on baptisms which is good; it will force a lot more less active work.

This transfer I plan on getting our ward council more involved by inviting them to set us up less-active lessons and hopefully that will be a good start to where we can eventually transition to having them set us up lessons with potential investigators. We will see how it goes; it'll take some time.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Members are good to them and us!


A member sent us these photos. That's an impressive banana split!

How do they stay skinny?

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

There go Mom & Dad's dreams of having Taylor become a doctor


At the Martin Harris Pageant with Elder Coronado!

I can't believe that next week I will be emailing you with transfer news. Time is flying by so quickly. Especially this past transfer; it has been the fastest one of my mission. This week there have been a couple tough changes in our area that made things kind of discouraging. First thing was we went by to see Lenny and Neri, and they said they were moving the next day to North Logan. So they moved, and we sent the referral up and haven't heard from them since then. Then we talked to Hernan, and he said he won't be coming back from Wyoming for at least another month. Then last night Ana called and said she doesn't want to meet with us anymore. So that kind of happened all at once, ha-ha, but we are still working. I must be calloused or something, because it wasn't nearly as devastating as Ana and Angel. By the way, an update on them. It turns out that Ana had been lying to us, and she was the one convincing Angel not to get baptized. In fact, Elder Plowman has one of Ana's friends getting baptized this weekend. When Ana found out, she called her and said she wouldn't be her friend anymore. So I guess Ana had been lying that whole time and been the one trying to stop the whole thing, but Angel just didn't want to blame it on her. That was pretty disappointing, but Elder Plowman is more patient than me, so it's probably better that he handles it rather than me.

We did start talking to one new guy named Ceasar. He is 18 and is dating one of the seventeen year olds. He got here from Mexico recently and doesn't speak any English. So a couple weeks ago, he had come to church with his girlfriend, and we went to talk to him in English. He just laughed at us and walked away. So we thought he was just a punk, BUT it turns out he doesn't speak English so he just kind of laughed and walked away, because he didn't know what we were saying. So that was kind of funny to realize, but we talked to him, and he said he works and plays soccer all the time but would be interested. He actually came with his girlfriend to a family night on this past Sunday. It was mostly adults so I think they were kind of uncomfortable, but I am still glad that they went. Every Sunday night there are about three families that do a family night for us to invite people to and whoever teaches the lesson chooses the next person to teach the lesson the following week.  I was chosen so any cool object lesson ideas that can entertain 20 people and a few little kids is what I am looking for.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Here we go again!


So there is an elder with a whip and he let me try...like the indiana jones kind..so I whipped myself in the face by accident and everyone for the next three days that I saw asked what happened to my face..it looked worse in person.


This one is right before we ate some habaneros filled with cream cheese..a member nearby made them for us..very hot! 

SO this week we had a pretty good district meeting. It was all about working with members and building trust so Elder Coronado and I gave an example of how not to act in a ward council that was pretty fun. It was similar to the way that Elder Endemano and Marquardt did it a few years back. Before hand, the four Spanish missionaries made lunch for our district. A couple weeks ago, the sisters had bought us pizza, and they told us we needed to do it the next week. SO we made enough for all our district, but when we went out to eat it, several members of another district came out and started eating! NO one invited them, and they didn't ask so it looks like no more district lunches now. It was too bad; nobody really got enough so we went home and ate something really quickly. Then we had a zone blitz of the sisters’ area covering the singles ward.

Luckily, that also happens to be our area so we went out tracting, and I found a woman named Angelica. She is awesome! She started crying when I was testifying to her that God had sent us. Since then, we have had two lessons with her. She is very interested and has known members of the church in the past and trusts and loves them. She is having a lot of family problems right now which makes us meeting with her kind of weird, because her husband checks her phone and computer everyday to see if she has talked to any boys. So she asked us to come and teach her during the day as long as we bring a woman with us (and a man so we can go in the house). We aren't really sure what to do, because she really wants us to come by and has felt the Spirit, but her husband wouldn't be ok with it. It's really sad; she talked about how when he gets home she just tells the kids to not make any noise and stay in their room the whole night so he doesn't get mad at them. Not really sure what the solution here is, but for now, we will just get her some friends from the relief society to come visit her and read the scriptures with her. SO the zone blitz didn't help the sisters a lot we were blitzing for, but it helped us out!

The next day I went on an exchange with a visa waiter named Elder Wyckoff in my area. We had planned on doing splits with the bishopric, so I wouldn't actually be with him at night. So the few days before, I set up Wednesday with double appointments and was going to send him off to teach with a member. He wasn't very excited when I told him that since he doesn’t speak Spanish at all yet. He has been out two months and was trained by Elder SaldaƱa, and so he doesn't feel like he has learned anything and didn't know how to do any of the lessons. I told him he would be fine and that's the best way to learn. He went with a member and for the first lesson he just sat there while the member bashed for an hour. Then the other two appointments fell through. Some how he got through the night, but I don't know if it was the best night of his mission, ha-ha. Either way I have done that with everyone I have trained; I think it's a good way to learn. When Elder Ward and I did it with Elder Pyne, he came back with a baptismal date!

So jumping to Saturday night, we went to help with the Martin Harris pageant. The Martin Harris pageant is something that happens every year in Clarkston (near the Idaho border) and it is a lot like the Easter pageant in Mesa just not as many seats. They have been doing it for like twenty years, and they said last night they had their millionth viewer. I will have to take the family back to see it one day; it was pretty cool to see the whole story from Martin Harris' perspective, and how he (mainly his wife’s fault from what the pageant made it seem) lost the pages but then was still a witness. We couldn’t figure out why everyone brought blankets. We had our short sleeve shirts on, but we quickly figured out why. We will go back again to help this week. It runs everyday for a couple weeks and different missionaries go everyday. We leave at like four and then spend the night at a member’s house up there (so we don't have to drive back late) and come back the next morning. It takes a whole night away form proselyting which is too bad. We mainly just passed out programs and shook members hands and told them where we were from and how long we had been out (the question every member asks as soon as they see us, ha-ha!). So the best part of that was we stayed at a guy's guest house, and he had swiss rolls, nutty bars, chips and salsa, and pancakes left out for us. It was like staying in a hotel. We are staying in his house again when we go this Thursday.

We had a service project last week that made me feel like I was on extreme makeover home edition. We went to go fix up a family's house to sell. The thing that made me feel like we were on that show is because the mom kept crying that so many of us had come out. I filled in lots and lots of holes in the wall, and it reminded me of me ‘practicing my hammering’ in the Antelope house, and Dad teaching me how to fill them in and paint over them. I also realized I don't have enough skills; Tyson needs to teach me. They asked me if I knew how to do dry wall. I didn't and felt ashamed like I wasn't manly enough or something, ha-ha.

Ana is doing ok. She bailed out and didn't come to church because, she had to do laundry. She obviously just got nervous and decided not to come. We have tried to ask her if we can get someone to pick her up, but she always says no, but we probably will do it anyways next week. Lenny and Neri showed up 30 minutes late and then they left right after the first meeting to take their sick son to the hospital. At least they came at all though! Neri didn't like it, because she doesn't like to  leave the house or look at anyone. We are trying to get them set up with a therapist since Lenny has a lot of mental problems and Neri has the worst depression in the world. Every lesson is the same with them; she comes out depressed then we talk to her for 30 minutes, and she is fine and willing to keep commitments to get better. Then we go back the next time and start all over.

Hernan randomly decided to go to Wyoming for a week and half, so he didn't come to church. That was so disappointing, because he is the best investigator we have, but he works so, so much, and they don't warn him they just pick him and drive him away for a while to work in another state. Miguel didn't feel like coming to church this week, just an 8 year old kid I guess, just all the more reason we need to get his very uninterested mom involved. Hopefully we can build enough trust to let her teach us a lesson by still stopping by to teach Miguel in the mornings. There is still no progress with the Salazars. They won't come to our ward still, and someone told them not to talk to us so we can't set up a lesson with them.

Big news! This Friday I will be getting on facebook and keep getting on everyday to proselyte with friends/family from home. There’s a lot of grey area…basically anyone that's less active or not a member I can talk to. I will update my status and you can see it. You can even write on my wall if you want; I just can't reply to it. We aren't clear on everything yet. I will find out on Friday. Dad probably knows more than me. I hope it will be a successful tool. It is a little weird. I kind of wonder what I will do since I really don't know a lot of nonmembers.  I am so mad I missed the mission leadership conference where they talked about and introduced it. The first mlc that I miss after released had to be this one!  

Love you all, take care!
Elder Bassett