Blog Description

This is a blog for the family and friends of Collin Park. He will be serving a two year mission in the Sierra Leone Freetown Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he left on January 24, 2013. While Collin is on his mission his Mom will be posting pictures and letters as she gets them, the content will be straight from Collin (unless otherwise noted) - spelling and punctuation will be corrected of course! Commentary and clarification may be added by his Mom as needed.
UPDATE: Collin's mission was split in half! The Sierra Leone Mission included the country of Liberia when Collin first left. As of July 1, 2013, the mission was split along the border and the new mission created: the Liberia, Monrovia Mission. Collin will never see the country of Sierra Leone. He has been in Monrovia Liberia since he left the MTC in Ghana.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Because of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone Missions were evacuated on August 4, 2014 and missionaries were reassigned to different missions. Collin was reassigned to the Salt Lake City Central Mission.

Monday, June 03, 2013


June 3, 2013

This week was so fast!!!!!!   

But to start, I missed another family member’s birthday,  Love you Katie!!

Since my companion is also our district leader, once every transfer he has to go on exchanges with the zone leaders.  So I go to spend 2 days with Elder Kouao from Ivory Coast.  It turns out that he is my mission “grandfather.”  (he trained my trainer who is my “father”).   This guy is crazy!  Let’s just say, before he met with the missionaries, he had a really good plan for becoming president...  but he awesome.   He had a lot of cool stories.  He served 9 months in my last area, so we talked a lot about the people there.  A lot of the people he was able to baptize are still active, to have people stay active here is hard, sometimes they become converted to the missionary and then when he leaves, we don’t see them anymore...

For some reason no matter where you go in the world, rumors of the church start flying!  There are many flying about us missionaries in Thinker Village (4 of us).  They aren’t true.  It’s probably happening because we've had a lot of success recently.  the adversary is working hard against us.  The rumors are starting, probably do to our success, because yesterday (Sunday) we had 15 nonmembers come to church.  Some even said that they weren’t going to be able to go, but they came anyways.  It was a good Sunday, plenty people at service.  We had a lady get interviewed for baptism on Saturday, got food from the branch president.  It was a good day. 

We teach people that our Heavenly Father answers their prayers.  He has truly answered mine recently.  The past couple weeks we have been struggling to find people to teach, and when we go to teach them they wouldn’t be there.  So, as Alma states to his son in Alma 38:5, trust Heavenly Father and He will help you overcome your afflictions and trials,  that’s what I did.  I went to my knees and prayed like I never had before on mission.  The first 3 months it was easy to teach, easy to have people get baptized.  But this past month has been a struggle.  So I prayed to know what we could do better, why we weren’t having success.  The next thing I thought of was to study better and plan better, and that’s what we did.  We started to have better planning sessions at the end of the day, better companion studies in the morning and now, it’s paying off.   We aren’t getting bounced, we're finding people left and right.   We have a lot of people come to church.   Like I said, this week has flown by.  A busy and tired missionary is a happy one, especially when he doesn’t know where the day went or how he is going to see so many people in one day. 
Busy missionary = Happy missionary. 
This week was good!  This week was fast!

Love you all miss you all. 

Elder Park

The White African

T.I.A

No comments:

Post a Comment