Hey everyone!

The base of Mt. Teide

It's been a pretty good week, had some fun. As always, I'll start where I left off. So last p-day, we played futbol. That was fun for the first 30 minutes, then I messed my ankle or something and could barely walk. So after that, it was just kinda irritating. I was limping for a couple days, but it's good now, just a small bruise. 

The next big thing was that we did intercambios with the zone leaders. That was good. We went to their island for that. Due to the timing for our flights it ended up being a super short intercambio, but it was fun, and I learned a bunch.

Chocolate Frosting

Hello my fellow inhabitants of tierra,

It has been a good week here on the island of Tenerife. So first things first. I just want to say that it is a very important day today, because it is the birthday of one W. Mark Bassett. Yeah, Happy Birthday Dad! 

Ok, onto the week. The week starts off with Elder Johnson deciding to make some peanut butter bars for district meeting. At the end of the day, we get back to the piso, and he starts making them. Then he asks me to make the chocolate frosting. So I start making it and right off the bat big problem. The recipe calls for powdered sugar, but we don’t have it. So, being the desperate man I am, I start using white sugar. But, we only have half a cup. Already committed now, I used brown sugar instead. So I make the frosting, and it turns out tasting quite strangely. I kept messing with it trying to make it taste better, but eventually had to give up. In the end, I threw in some eggs, a little flour, and about an hour later we had a bundt cake. No joke, frosting became a bundt cake. And it was actually very delicious. Ha, so we had that for district meeting.

Onto the rest of the week. We have been focusing a lot this week on talking in the street to try and build up our teaching pool. Thankfully, we got a bunch of citas lined up for this week, so we´ll see how those go. We spent a couple days in Puerto this week and a couple in La Laguna. Our plans at this point are to be in Puerto Thursday and Friday and La Laguna every other day. We also spend every other Saturday in Puerto. Both places have a lot of potential, and we are already starting to see a lot of miracles, which is awesome!

Big Changes!

Hey everyone!

Ok, so this has been a super crazy week!

It all started with this last preparation day. I was in piso folding some laundry when our phone started going off. I go to check it, and it’s President Pack. I answer; he asks me how I’m doing. I tell him I’m fine. Then he goes on to tell me that I need to start packing, because I´m getting emergency transferred. That caught me by surprise. I mean I’d only been with Elder Freire for one week.

My new area is......the city La Laguna of the island Tennerife. Yeah, I’m in the Canary Islands. It turns out that I´m actually swapping with Elder Brasher; he is now serving in the office, and I’m companions with his previous companion, Elder Johnson.

So, when we received the news, there wasn’t a lot of time for anything. Because it was an emergency transfer, it was super last minute, and I had to leave the next morning.  I had time to meet with one family and say goodbye to Alvaro. Then the next morning, I was out of Móstoles. It was a little hard not being able to say goodbye to all of the investigators and members I have come to know over the past 5 months, but I bet one day I’ll be able to visit again and say high.

Big day coming up!

Hey guys!

Ok, man! So it's been a crazy week. Pretty good, but crazy. So what to talk about? After transfers, we just started getting right to work. But there was some kind of mix up with transfers and all of our data on our area book app got sent all over the place. So this past week we have been working pretty much relying on my memory for all the appointments we had. It’s been a little rough, but we are working through it. So let's see stuff that has gone down. 

We've been super busy with a lot of traveling and a lot of meetings. As far as our investigators this week we finished teaching Alvaro everything. He received and passed his baptismal interview. His baptism is this Saturday. He is super pumped, and so am I. I'm so excited for him; he's just so chill.

At one point in the week, we went to a pueblo called Arroyomolinos. On our way back my pass for the bus ran out leaving us stranded in this pueblo way outside of the city. We were gonna walk back, but luckily we were able to get picked up in a car by one of our investigators. Pretty cool. 

Recently I have been focusing a lot on the Spirit and the importance of receiving personal revelation. I think a lot of times when we are faced with an important decision or something that is stressing us out or is really important, we fall back on our own knowledge and experience. Through that we can learn, progress, and make good decisions, but not nearly as well as when we rely on the wisdom of our Heavenly Father. Receiving personal guidance through the Spirit isn't always easy, and we have to work for it sometimes, but it is some of the best guidance we can receive. I invite everyone to try and rely on the Spirit more in their lives. When we do it, we can become so much greater then we are.

I love you all!

- Elder Bassett 

Country view of Arroyomolinos

I really love the smoothie I'm drinking right now

Hello my peeps!

Ok, so it's been a pretty good couple days. So to be honest not a lot happened, it’s been a pretty good couple of days though. I had an intercambio in Alcorcon with Elder Ferguson. That was good, we had trouble finding people to talk to though, because Madrid was hit with a huge thunderstorm. It kind of caught us off guard, and it was an intercambio, so I didn't have my raincoat. I borrowed one from Elder Mangum’s closet, but he's about half a foot shorter then me, so the jacket didn't really fit. Yeah, I got very wet. It was fun though; we had a good time.

Saturday we played futbol again. 2 of our investigators came, which was great. Other then that we were just talking in the street all day. One cool thing that happened is that we were able to meet with Alvaro and his parents to get permission for him to be baptized. So that's good. I'll keep ya updated on that.

Another crazy thing happened while I was in Alcorcon. I noticed the elders had a scale, and I figured I'd weigh myself for the first time since I left the MTC. Come to find out, I've lost 20 pounds. Kinda caught me off guard. I thought it was broken at first; turns out it wasn't.

Ok, so that was it for this week. I love you all; sorry I didn't write a lot this week. It’s only been a couple days after all. This week I wanted to talk a little bit more about The Book of Mormon. I'm reading right now in Alma about Captain Moroni, he was not only an amazing leader, but also a man of great faith. I started thinking about that a little bit more this week. He had his position as a military leader, but everything he did was centered in Christ and helping others. Often times in our lives, we are so focused on the day to day things that we leave Christ out of it, but when we look at Moroni’s example, having Christ in our lives only strengthens us more. Never forget Christ, when you’re stressed, when your tired, when your angry, or when your depressed, always remember Him and strive to follow Him. If we do that, we, too, can be firm in the faith, and true representatives of Christ.

I love you all, till next week 

- Elder Bassett 

Sorry no pics 

Happy Birthday America!

Hello everyone!

It's been a while, hasn't it? So what exactly has gone on the past week and 2 days? We had zone conference. I think this has been my favorite so far. It was really powerful, and I feel like I learned a lot. The focus of the zone conference was refocusing on our missionary purpose. One new thing we are doing as a mission is trying to teach the Restoration to every single active member in the mission by this September. As a part of that, President wants us to practice teaching it in just 4 minutes, so we can just be in and out and have more emphasis on the spirit and the power of the message.

Elder Simmons and I have already had a couple appointments like that, and they are really great. It’s a little hard teaching that short sometimes, but we are practicing it a bunch and trying to get it better.

After zone conference, we had our interviews for the transfer. They were super good. I always love meeting and talking with President Pack one on one. It's always a very edifying experience.

One thing we learned at zone conference that is kind of crazy, in the next 3 transfers, 71 missionaries will be going home and 61 new missionaries will be coming in. That's when we have a total of 180 missionaries in our mission. So we are going to be having some big changes in the coming months.

At the end of the week, we had futbol again, and we were able to get a couple of our investigators to come which was great. Afterwords, we had a super good lesson with one of those investigators whose name is Alvaro. He is this 13 year old who comes to play almost every week and already has a super good relationship with the members and missionaries. He told us he is interested and wants to come to church. He's a really good kid. We ran into his mom at sometime in the week, and she told us how much he loves talking to us and that one day after meeting with us he came to her and said a prayer with her in their living room. He really is a good kid; I'm excited to see how things work out for him.