Elder Austin Carroll

August 1, 2016

Hi all!!

Like you, I can't believe it is August and Friday is my official year mark. We are either a year out until I'm home or less and that is just crazy. In some ways it has gone so fast, others I feel like I've been here forever. Sounds like it was a good relaxed week for you all. Man do I miss those!

So to be 100% honest this week was a pretty hard one. Really tough and overwhelming. So I am staying here in DC 3rd and my new companion is Elder Sherratt who came down from being one of the Annapolis ZLs. He's from Anaheim, California and has been out for 15 months. He's a really great missionary.

Sending home a group of 24 that includes some of your good friends on the mission is really hard. This was the first group that has been hard to see go. Some of those guys were like older brothers to me when I got here. So watching them all leave the Stake Center parking lot to go to the airport was a real heart breaker. But they all served great mission and I'm happy for them to move on to other things.

So as we all would have guessed, getting a new mission President, loosing 24 missionaries, bringing in 23, plus adding a new stake and 28 missionaries from another mission is a lot of changes. And change is so hard sometimes. It is good, but so hard. There have been so many little changes (and big ones) that have happened it is super overwhelming. It's been tough. I could list out all the little things that have been changed with rules and everything, and each one on its own doesn't seem like much, but add them all together and it's been rough. I know all of these changes are meant to make us better and serve better but still is tough. Plus the missionaries that came down from Baltimore are struggling with the new mission. I can't blame them for missing their old mission, but DC North is such an amazing place to be. And they just keep complaining about anything we do different than how they did. So that's hard.. Elder Sherratt isn't like that, but it's sure an adjustment to a comp who is use to a lot of things going different.

But I'm glad that through all these changes we have someone great like President Johnson. It's a good thing I love him cause it would be pretty rough if I didn't. I had a really awesome interaction with him after MLC (Mission Leadership Council) this part week. We had discussed a lot of changes during the meeting and there were a lot of not happy people in the room but by the end everyone accepted it and moved on. So I was talking to him after and made a comment that I may have been mad, but I accept the changes and support him. Then he looked at me and said, "Elder Carroll I'm glad you were mad. Cause that shows you are passionate about this and the other missionaries. I would so much rather have someone who is PO'ed because they actually care." Then he went on and just was really complimentary of me and talked for a few minutes with me. It was really nice and is something I've looked to this past week a lot.

Overall this is one of those weeks I'm sure I won't miss on the mission when I get home. But the mission as a whole is so worth it. There are gonna be ups and downs and the best thing about downs is you then get to go up. Well, hopefully cause it will be rough if we have to go down any more haha.

I sure love and miss you all! Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers!

Love,

Austin