Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Time is going by too fast!

SO, Elder Weidner and Elder Salazar came over for lunch last week, and right before they left, Elder Weidner (a big guy) decided to jump through the trap door. As soon as he landed, he went straight back making a huge hole in the sheet rock..and he wasn't willing to pay or help fix it! So we did the sheet rock this morning and will paint next week.

Another week has flown on by! We are in the last week of the transfer. We picked up a very solid investigator on Sunday. He didn't even let me finish asking the question before he said yes to being baptized...the 29th! He has already been coming to church for three weeks and said he will get up 30 minutes earlier everyday to read The Book of Mormon. He is a marine and is in the process of leaving to find other work, because his shoulder is pretty injured; he's in his thirty's. Se llama Anthony. He is a great guy, and the elder’s quorum president is the one he goes to church with. He didn't grow up around here; he is from Texas, but he is here temporarily while he recruits. He is looking for a more solid place to stay and live.

We also taught a lesson to a girl in high school named Sharron, yesterday. The sisters have been teaching her for a few lessons, but she lives in our area, so they called to switch it over to us. The fellowshipper  doesn’t live in her area, but he is willing to come with her to church in West Point. The hard thing is that she lives in the ward with probably the weakest youth in the stake (as far as numbers); there is only one person her age. It'll be tough getting her to love her West Point ward like she has the one in Syracuse. But they definitely need her in the ward to strengthen it. She has a missionary friend out who gets home in a year and says she wants to wait for him to baptize her; we will work on that next lesson. I was trying to be mellow, because the sisters told me that she is a little shy and thinks elders are pushy, so I needed to relax and let them lead things for the first lesson (oh, and of course they told me I needed to smile a lot). So it went well. She is very solid. Once we teach the importance and urgency of baptism, I think she will feel the need for it to happen sooner.

Skyler is 10 and his mom wants to wait until his family comes out, which is probably early April, to get baptized. The recent convert lessons are beginning with Cecilia, and we are tagging along. The ward missionary that is doing them is amazing. She is having Cecilia and Sister Vallet do personal progress with her since they didn't have a chance to do it when they were younger. She is overwhelmed, because she doesn't know the recent convert lessons, but she has genuine love and the Spirit, so she does very well. It makes me happy to see things working so well like this with a solid fellowship helping her through the lessons and bringing her to church and everything. Cecilia can still only go every other week, but we pray Sister Vallet stops working on Sundays, so they can go. I can't remember if I have said, Sister Vallet's son, Rylee, is four and autistic and needs a couple people at church with him to mellow him out. Chris works every other week, so Cecilia goes with him every other week and Sister Vallet works every Sunday, so doesn't ever go for now.

This week we went to visit Brother Murray. He is the guy we helped do tile. He still isn't done with all the remodeling and was going to put in the baseboards and something else that day. We offered our help, and he said, “Do you know how to put in baseboards, cut angels, and things like that?” We said, “Yes of course,” because we wanted to help. I assumed Elder Coronado knew how, and he thought I would know. So we left the house to go change and realized neither of us knew anything. We raced over to Brother Facer’s house, and he taught us in ten mintues how to measure and cut angles. Then he looked up on wiki-how how to do it, so we could read and internalize it. I even memorized some of the words, too, so I could say them out loud and make Brother Murray think I knew what I was doing. So we went back and spent a few hours, and it worked out great! Brother Murray said we did a great job and even walked in to the room, looked around, and said, "Wow, you guys really do know what you're doing!" Don't know how we pulled that off, but I guess the Spirit was with us and knew how to do baseboards. Tyson will be proud. He will need to coach me when we live in Utah on doing stuff like this that Dad has taught me before, and I have just forgotten how. I need a refresher.

All nine meetings we went to on Sunday went well. Running around to shake everyone’s hand that we can was fun as usual on our "day of rest." Our stake president's big thing on missionary work is just that we are seen. Every time people see us, they think about missionary work, and every time they talk to us, we ask for referrals. They kind of feel guilty saying no. So he wants us to just let as many people see us as possible, especially Sundays.

Don't send things to West Point anymore since transfers are next week (I'm not expecting you to but just to make sure). And thanks for the package this week for St. Patrick’s Day! The almonds are so good in the little bags to just bring out for when I get hungry when we are out and about. BTW, our new thing we tried today is unsweetened almond milk. Some members convinced us to try it. We will see how it goes. Have you ever done almond milk before? We are just using it for protein. I love you all so much!
Take care,
Elder Bassett

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