30th week in Spokane

One thing that comes along with being a missionary is the blessing of meeting all sorts of new people; no matter how normal, or strange they might be. And let me tell ya, I've met quite a few strange ones! But we met a man this week that tops them all a hundred fold! Let me introduce to you Terry.. When we first knock on the door Terry cracks it open and says "who is it?" When he saw who it was he closed the door. My companion and I looked at each other just long enough for the door to re-open and out walks a man who is wearing nothing but sweat pants, he's about 6'3" 240 pounds, he's not fat, not skinny, pretty broad, about 45 years old, has a long scraggly beard and long hair. I immediately knew that this was going to be a fun door! He starts the conversation by comparing himself to Job because of a skin infection that he has, and in the process of showing us this skin infection he seemed to think it was necessary to show us his butt. Then he proceeds to make a real quick reference to how he has died before, in paradise, but has risen again. Then he started to get extremely excited, raising his voice and waving his arms around and immediately he commands us to name off all of the ten commandments and he squatted and listened and waited. We were caught so off guard by it that we kinda stammered and slowly named them off and as we said them he would get all sorts of excited and when we would get one out of order he would completely tense up shake a little, almost angry like and would try to calmly correct us and then would say continue. Well we ended up talking to him for a little over an hour because to be honest, at first it was amusing to watch him get all excited and prance around and I figured I'd never get a chance to talk to someone this weird again, so I took advantage of the opportunity at hand. I'll try to make this as brief as possible while still getting the gist of it so bear with me. After further questioning we found out that terry was working in Hawaii (paradise) while he was jumped and beaten to "death" he said he was dead for three hours. But then he rose again, but what came back was not the old Terry.. he said that his "death" is what caused his eyes to be open and he understood so much better the Bible and he found all sorts of these codes hidden inside of it (he twisted so many things around it was seriously eerie). All of his searching and all of his twisting made him come to the conclusion that he is Jesus re-incarnated. Because he came to this conclusion he decided that he needed a body guard so he prayed for weeks on end for a body guard to come to him, and that's when he found Moses re-incarnated. Moses is a Mexican guy in his early twenties, he described him as good looking, perfect skin, beautiful long black hair, had all sorts of tattoos that to him symbolized a lot of different things that he twisted around from his bible searches. Anyways, Terry couldn't prove that this guy wasn't Moses, so therefore he is Moses re-incarnated. Terry said that he poisoned them both to prove his theory. Terry died and rose again for the second time but Moses never died.. Anyways, I was starting to get a little mad by this point because now he's putting other lives at stake. So his conclusion was that he and his Moses friend are the two witnesses that it talks about in revelations 11 and that they were going to go over there very soon. The prophecy about the two witnesses for some reason has always intrigued me and so I have done a lot of research and study on the subject so I quizzed him about it and of course he got stumped and changed the subject. Anyways how this encounter ended was by him telling us a story about how he was over at someone elses house (because he goes around preaching like we do) and he said that one lady was in complete tears because what he told them was frightening her and so she said that he was a lier and that he is twisted and then she said that she denies his god, so he "prophesied" that because she had denied his god that someone close to her was going to die. By this point I was sick of hearing his blasphemous remarks and without thinking I just opened my mouth and said I deny his god and I'll deny it three times, so I did. I told him I do not deny my Father in Heaven, I do not deny my Savior Jesus Christ, what I deny is everything that you have said, its not true, you have twisted the truth. He had a very frightened look on his face and he acted like I was the plague, I told him we were leaving and I stretched my arm out towards him and he ran down the stairs to try to get away from me, it was quite the sight. I felt pretty sick for the rest of the day, it was from the fact that I allowed myself to be in the presence of such an evil spirit, one of the many lessons learned from that is to leave much quicker next time we run into another "Terry"!! But, God is aware of His missionaries and as soon as we left from there we ran into a guy that was walking down the street and we taught him the restoration! Sorry to start off with such a weird story, but i just thought I'd amuse ya a bit! In spite of Terry, this week actually went really well. the work here is starting to pick up quite a bit. We found five new people to teach and the Frodshams made a lot of progress! We also had zone conference this last week and that went way good, we talked mostly on the importance of prayer and the importance of getting the people we teach to pray. because that's the great thing about being a missionary, we don't do any of the converting, all we do is teach and invite and then we step aside and let the Spirit take over. As we applied what we learned from zone conference we were able to witness a few miracles take place. The power of prayer is real and is essential to our progression in this life as we each make our journey to come closer to Christ. I know this is true.