Wednesday, March 17, 2010

recollections from a life

One experience seems so incredible that I can hardly believe it myself. We were living at the home of a cousin of Ernest's, way up in the Ensign Ward somewhere, up across from the State Capitol. Ernest [her husband] was really in a lot of pain [he was dying of cancer]; he was having a lot at that time. The family had gone away for Thanksgiving vacation, and we were there alone. I knew not a person, not anybody to call. A knock came to the door. I answered it and a man said, "Is there trouble in this house?" "Yes," I said. "Come in." He didn't have to look twice to see as he came in--Ernest was on a bed just across the room. He asked me if I'd like to have him administered to, and I said, "Yes, oh yes, yes." I got the oil, and he gave Ernest a blessing. He was relieved, and sank into sleep

The man stayed there a while, and we talked. He said he came from below Twenty-seventh South, and that he had felt impressed to catch a bus, and he came up Main Street to wherever the bus changed and got on another bus. And then he had to walk a block and a half to where we were. he'd never seen me, but he was directed to this place. he wasn't a large man; he was kind of a spare man, more slender. And he had a heavy, heavy kind of iron grey hair that he had parted in the middle, but he wasn't an old man. He'd lost the sight of one eye. He was a convert; very, very wonderful. He was full of the spirit, and after his blessing, Ern went to sleep and slept all night long, the first night's sleep he'd had in a long time. This man was very real; he wasn't any apparition. He was flesh and blood. And I never saw him again, and I never heard of him again.

I thought at the time, how wonderful, how wonderful. Could he be one of the three Nephites? I wondered. But the three Nephites would surely have had both eyes. And he seemed so earthy. He looked more like a farmer.
--Juanita Brooks

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