June 24, 2013

Okay so this week was a pretty good one we had some good stuff go down as a companionship and I will do my best to run through all of them quickly because a recent convert just called me and burned a few minutes of my email time so this one may be a little short so forgive me.

 First of all this week we had a baptism, the Baptism of Maria de Jesus Lopez who is a wonderful woman who overcame a lot of opposition to get baptized. That is really awesome for us as missionaries to see that there are people out there who are incredibly faithful and have real desires to change and get closer to God. She wants it for herself and a lot for her family too which is awesome because she is already ready to do some member work which is super important for all of us to be doing. We are going to work with her family this next week a lot and see if we can't get more of them involved. Quetzali especially she is a brilliant lady herself and just needs to stop giving heed to the adversary, more on them this next week. Plus Elder Ellsworth came down and got to speak at Marias Baptism and she was so happy about that, so was I. I miss him and was happy to meet his family, he isn't Elder anymore he is just Taylor which is weird. His mom is a nice lady and thanked me a bunch for serving with her son. I dunno why, but I was happy to see he is doing well, he will probably be married soon.

This week we found a few new people to teach, including the Reyna Family a family of 5 who we met while Alma, the mother, was watering her yard. Her 16 year old Valerie wants to know why there are so many churches and so tonight we will be teaching the whole family and they will feel the power and the spirit of the Restoration and will accept BD's and will all be baptized together in July, I have it all planned out already. Also, we met a young man this week named Angel who is 13 and who really likes church and stuff and we met him because his 10 year old brother, who teaches classes at his church, called us over to ask us how many people were going to make it to heaven. Apparently he thought we were, "Catholics trying to go around and teach people lies about God." He was ready to throw down with us it was pretty awesome. But he softened up after he found out we weren't a couple of liars and we were able to place a Book of Mormon with his brother Angel who was really interested in the message it contains and the chapter we left him about the 2,000 stripling warriors. We are going to go visit him soon as well because he comes from a family of 10, and they are baptists which are a coveted baptism because baptists are hard to convert because they are very faithful to their beliefs.

We also saved a puppy this week. We were biking on this dirt road and some crying was heard from the brush and so we stopped to see what had happened, well someone had dumped a little puppy looked like a pitbull mix on the side of the road to die. So Elder Casteel and I, not being able to bring ourselves to leaving it there picked her up and took her over to the nearest members house. Maria Guerrero was very happy to take her in and was happy to know she would be having a new friend. It was kind of a neat experience because my son is a softie for dogs and made me pray to see what we should do about the dog. I think I am going to name it Reeses.

Crazy story and I wish I had a picture, elder paulsen does so I will send it ASAP, we were on exchanges and we found this bird dead in a fence. We decided it had to have flown down too low and tried to fly through the fence and failed miserably. It was a sight and so we stopped and took a picture. Also a huge pitbull attacked my new shoes this week luckily they are just fine and are steel toed so when I kicked its face it left me alone.

Okay so this week we got to watch that leadership broadcast and my invitation is to go watch it and pray about what you can do in your lives to help the Lord Hasten his work. The work goes so much better with Member help and I promise that as you do what you can to help the missionary effort you will be blessed and you will be a thousand times happier. I love you all, sorry it is short I am not really sure what else happened this week.

Elder Bassett