Never again...

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