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

Traslados

There once was an ancient civilization who when they would go to war, would consume the hearts of their enemies to help them gain their strength and become victorious.... I guess I'll be able to jump a lot higher now, because I tried rabbit heart for the first time this week. Ha. That was part of a pueblos visit that we had this week. That was a cool trip; we spent all day in a pueblos then ate rabbit with a member afterwards.

Our Pueblo visit: Elder Simmons, Elder Phillips, Elder Bassett, Elder Jepson

The zone leaders had a super cool milagro happen to them. They were only talking to people for 20 minutes when they found a woman who said that her daughter was investigating the church. They find the daughter and it turns out she has been in Ecuador for 2 months. While in Ecuador, she was about to be baptized but didn't have time. Since then, she has been looking for the church here in Spain. She came with us to a member cita and already is starting to hit it off with them, which is great. 

Transer Eve

Hello my friends, I greet you. 

This is the last p-day before transfers next week, and there are going to be some big changes. Elder Simmons is for sure going to head out; both Elder Phillips and Elder Ferguson will be going home, and we might be getting a new companionship of sisters. It's gonna be crazy! We'll see though. It’s not for a while; and we never really know what's gonna happen till it happens, but onto the week!

Not a lot happened, just a lot of talking and a lot of calls. It's been getting hotter and hotter every day. It’s been an average of 37 Celsius (100° F) the past couple of days. A little more everyday, not as bad as the Malaga mission or anything, but still pretty hot. We're surviving though.

There were 3 new things we did this week that were fun.

The first is that we did service in a residency center nearby in a pueblo called Navalcanero. We brought Alvaro with us, and we went and just talked to old people there for about an hour. It was good; although, I understood practically nothing of what was said. There were some very think accents being spoken; even Alvaro was having trouble understanding, so you can imagine how lost I was. We also did service at another pueblo; we just helped move a bunch of stuff on this little farm into a storage compartment.