Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Losing and Finding Yourself

So these are like my two favorite kids in the world. The kid in the green costume is Mason. Hes the boy that made me that little minion thing with the rubber bands. The pink poodle is Kennedy. She was so shy when we first met her but shes finally warming up to us.  The other picture is of one of our dinner appointments this last week.




Hello friends and family! Hows everybody doing?

Well we are doing great here in Idaho Falls! We had a very productive week. I feel like I'm actually starting to get better at this mission thing. Took long enough, right? I still have a long way to go but I'm finally feeling like an OK missionary! 

So this week we found some new people who actually want to listen to us! The first is a family who moved here in June from Utah. We were talking to the Clark family (members) who live across the street from them and they told us that they were really nice and aren't members of the church. So we decided to go meet them! Julie (the mom) opened the door and smiled at us (yay!) and let us in (WHOO!). Yeah that almost never happens. So we talked with the parents, Julie and Brian. Turns out both of them actually did grow up in the church but haven't been in years. The two kids however are not baptized members. Julie and Brian both said they want to start coming back to church and that they want their kids to know about the gospel. So Sister Latu and I recovered from our shock and quickly volunteered to come back and start teaching their family. So we now have an appointment with them for Tuesday. 

Then last night were knocking on doors trying to find people to teach, which by the way, is my new favorite thing to do. Haha you never know what to expect when that door opens. It has become quite entertaining. Anyways... tracting is rarely ever successful BUT it is still a way to find people and something that we have to do. I didn't really believe that that was true until last night. It was getting really late and we had been tracting all night with no success. And then we met Lelley. 

Lelley is a young single mom- maybe a couple years older than me. She immediately let us in and we got to know her. She just moved here in March with her 2-year-old son after her husband left her. She has a very interesting belief system. She says she is Christian but she also believes in reincarnation. She says she doesn't believe any one religion but she's just a very spiritual person. I was immediately intrigued with her. I love hearing about what other people believe and why they believe it. So I asked her about reincarnation and what it is which she was able to explain very well. And then I asked her WHY she believed in it. She had a harder time with that question. She said it was because this lady she knew told her about it and it made sense to her. 

I didn't want to take anything away from what she shared with us, but I did ask her to reconsider her source of truth. Something I love about how missionaries teach is our emphasis on the importance of asking God for answers. Heavenly Father is the source of all truth, and we cannot rely on anyone else to tell us what is really true besides Him. If we listen to man as the source of truth we will end up very confused and frustrated. I told Lelley she MUST ask God her questions. We then taught her what we believe and have come to know is true through the Holy Ghost. We asked her to pray about the things we shared and asked if we could come back and share more later this week. She said yes!! 

So yeah! We have some new investigators! 

Gosh I am so grateful for the people I've met here. I have truly gained a testimony of the scripture in Matthew 10:39, "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." As I continue to put my personal affairs aside and focus solely on serving my Savior and his lost sheep, I find myself. Its a weird paradox. The less I think about MY life and what MY goals are, the more I discover about myself and I naturally become the person I want to be.

I love my Heavenly Father and my Savior, Jesus Christ. How merciful they are to us. I am grateful for the power of prayer and for the ability we have to communicate directly with the source of all truth.

Until next time,
Sister Park




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