A Semana das Helenas

So this week we just happened to find a ton of elect ladies named Helena.

Helena #1- Talked about her last week. She is literally AMAZING but the depression is really strong. The medicine makes her sleep a lot so it's super hard for her to get to church in the morning. She doesn't even hear the phone, alarm, doorbell, or our knuckles on the door. But we had some super spiritual lessons with her this past week. And a super fun one. So we had another sister, Sister Gomes, staying with us for the night and we went over to Helena's house to teach her. Sister Gomes is from Brazil and is black and has the most beautiful hair with waves in it. Helena's mom, Fátima, was mesmerized by her. So in the middle of the lesson, Fátima starts running her fingers over the waves in Sister Gomes's hair and starts talking about how she would love to go surfing in her waves. Then later, we showed Fátima the note we left in her Book of Mormon and she tried to pronounce our names and said, "Seu-est-our Willam e Chiclete." Legit sounded like she was speaking German. It was good comic relief for Helena. When she laughed, there was such light in her eyes. She just needs lots of help from God and medicine.

Helena #2 - A reference from the elders. She's this cute old lady that showed up at church last week and came again this week. We taught her this week and invited her to be baptized and she accepted!! She marked her baptism in her calendar too :) She has a ton of faith and love to help others. She gave us an envelope the other day with a note written on it and then later when we opened it, there were 60£ in it... so on Sunday, we gave her another envelope with the money in it for her. Cute. She's super sweet and loves church!

We also received tons of references whose names were also Helena so that was fun!

For the past two weeks, we've had a substitute mission president because President Amorim went to the States to renew his green card there. So our mission president was President Moreira from the Seventy. He came to our district meeting last Tuesday and gave us some super cool suggestions. He said that if we want to baptize someone, we need to have three people marked for baptism. If we want three baptisms, we need to mark five people. So we're trying to mark way more people now! Also, he gave us the opportunity to ask him whatever we wanted. That was sweet!

We have a recently returned missionary in our ward and we went out the other day to work with her and she said to live each week of your mission as if it's your last. She said that she saw so many miracles during the last week of her mission, sooo since Sister Gilbert and I are nearing the ends of our missions (just got my return itinerary....), that's something that we want to do better. Live as if it's your last day!

BEIJINHOS GRANDES
Sister Hillam