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My sister never said to say "What's shakin' my masters of turkey bakin'" as the title for my blog letters again. It hurt my soul.
This week was pretty normal. I was pretty strict with my companion yesterday and talked to him pretty hard about what he wants to do with the last 2 months of his mission, what type of missionary he wants to be. He chose to try to work harder and hopefully it will help us out here in the coming weeks.
So like I said the week was pretty normal...I just have one story for the week and I think it's a good one for y'all. Here you go -- Funny Story for the Week:
Funny story for the week:
So we contacted this lady on the street the other day, this "senhora" who is probably like 65 years old. She was knitting while sitting on the sidewalk and allowed us to come into her humble little knitting store. She was very polite. She sat down in her chair and Elder Lemos and I stayed standing and began to give her our message.
Everything went well during the lesson, she participated and actually seemed interested in what we had to say (what a miracle!). I explained to her about the Book of Mormon and she said I could leave the book with her with a chapter marked for her to read. As I was marking 3 Nephi 11 for her to read my companion began to invite her to be baptized on April 18th (in our mission we are supposed to mark a baptism date during the 1st lesson with someone) but she politely declined saying that she is evangelical and was already baptized.
At this point I was finished marking the book and began an explanation about the priesthood and the way the baptismal ordinance should be ministered.
Now during my explanation I noticed she started getting, what appeared to be, bored with my explanation. I was a little confused but I kept going with what I was saying. Then about half way through she gave this huge YAWN and then her head fell back to lean against her back, and there it stayed, mouth gaping open. I was kind of confused and started to slow down what I was saying, when all of the sudden her head flew forward and hit her chest, then her cheeks started to shake and it looked like she was chewing on something in her mouth. I stopped speakin and said "Helena?..." She just kept going. "Helena?!" Then my companion grabbed her shoulder and shook her and little bit yelling "Senhora?! Helena?!"
He shook her some more but she kept going with what I had concluded at this moment was a seizure. We kept yelling and trying to wake her up but to no avail. After about 20 seconds a girl that worked in the store next to her came over and was all frantic and said "Ok, sometimes this happens. Will you guys say a prayer for her?!" Before we could even answer the girl had already put her hand on Helena's head and rose her left arm to the square and started chanting some expulsion prayer that I didn't quite understand. I told her to stop and we just kept trying to wake up Helena.
She finally woke up after about a minute and a half of her "convulsion" as they call it here. She looked up at us like she had no idea where she was...and I am pretty sure she didn't. We asked her if she remembered anything that had happened but she didn't. While she was talking I noticed she had a little bit of blood in her mouth because she had been biting her tongue I think. I asked her to open her mouth for me but she refused. She said she was fine and the other girl from the store said that she would stay there with her to take care of her and that we could leave. So we did haha. I said "Well, here's that book for you, please read the page that we marked." Then we left.
We went and sat over on a bench for a while while I laughed my head off and Elder Lemos told me that it wasn't funny. I called my DL Elder Anderson who is my good friend here and he loved it. He said "Wow, you two must have an extrememly powerful baptismal invite! I am going to ask you guys to demonstrate it for us at the next District Meeting so we can all learn to invite people to baptism with power!" Haha.
I had a division with Elder Anderson on Monday and we both wanted to go see her so we went over there and saw that she was fine...but we went to follow up on her reading and she said she hated the book and shoved it into my hands. We read a little part with her and when we told her that we have a prophet on the earth today she said "I know that we do! My pastor is a prophet" and when we tried to explain that he wasn't she got WAY mad and said she was going to start "treating us really bad" if we didn't leave. What I thought was just a nice old epileptic woman turned out to be a devil in disguise. She definitely won't join our church...but she gave me a great story and for that I am eternally grateful.
Well there you go, hopefully it was enjoyed. I am off to go sleep a little bit. We were going to go to the Zoo as a zone today but to our disappointed we woke up to the rain which wouldn't be so fun to walk around the zoo in so we canceled it until next week. Heartfelt farewell! Love you this............... much!
-Elder Brent Parsons
I hear people enjoyed the videos and pics. I will try to take more but it's hard sometimes because usually there is nothing here that is worth filming or taking a picture of...
I sent some pictures of this tree Elder Lemos and I cut this week. It was a service project for one of the neighbors of one of the members in our ward...her son kept climbing the tree to go smoke pot and the thick branches fully covered him from the vision of those on the ground. Thus, Elder Lemos and I cut that sucker down...successfully ridding one of what I am sure are many of the kid's pot-hideouts.
It took us 2 mornings adding up to about 7 hours of work...but it was actually pretty fun. I cut up my hands pretty bad due to the lack of hard manual labor they have seen while on my mission...oh plus the other 19 years of my life. But wounds heal...trees shaped to a form that won't allow cover for pot-heads last forever. I was actually kind of a master lumberjack-monkey up in that tree (as I am sure it is easy to see from the video I sent of me chopping away at the stubborn branches). Good times.
This week was a bit difficult in some ways. My companion Elder Lemos entertains me for hours when he talks about all his insecurities. Sometimes he can't even work because he loses all confidence in himself. We are supposed to do 12 "contacts" a day, 85 a week, which I usually do, but he only did 30 last week because he usually can't summon the courage to go talk to people on the street. I feel so bad for him sometimes because he has a year and 10 months on the mission and I am sure this self-esteem curse has plagued his work and the work of his companions his entire mission.
Sometimes he just asks me to sit down with him under a tree for a while and he just tells me more about all the fears about the future that he has. I try my best to console him but usually to no avail. He thought he lost the cell phone the other night but we found out he just left it at a member's house when we were having lunch...but for that whole night his confidence hit an all time low...an abyss that even I couldn't pull him out of.
But to be honest the last few days we have found quite a few people, and many families, which are really looking promising so this week and the weeks to come I think the work will get better here. I hope at least. It's a lot harder here to teach than it was in my last area, I won't lie. But we are trying.
I was walking on the street the other day and saw this lady sitting on the ground smoking on the other side of the street...I planned on just walking by her but then I all the sudden just decided to leave my companion and walk across the street to talk to her. I started to present myself to her and she was like "look Elder, I am a member and I know about the church. I was baptized about 5 years ago. It would be really nice though if you could stop by my house and talk to me again about the gospel." Sounded perfect so we went there on Monday night and talked to her and her husband for like 3 hours about why they left and if they were going to come back.
The mom was offended by something one of the sisters in the ward said. But it was really funny because they have been inactive for almost 3 years but have never stopped reading the Book of Mormon everyday, doing family home evenings, or any of the stuff that normal member families usually do. We just had to convince them to come back to church and they actually are going to. It was pretty cool actually because she said they had been thinking about going back to church and when she saw me on the street she thought "if he comes over and talks to me then I think my husband and I will decide to go back to church." Glad I listened to the Spirit's prompting to go over there eh?
Well, I don't have tons more to write. Good bunch of emails this week, well done everyone! Thanks for the support, love you all.
-Elder Brent Parsons
Other than that the week was normal and I unfortunately don't have any really sweet stories from the week.
That's all I have got for the week...and I would just like to say that my inbox was a bit skimpy this week...farewell!
