Elder Austin Carroll

October 31, 2016

Hi everyone!!

Well sounds like everything is going good back home! As far as for us with Halloween it's just an all day P-Day with us having to be in our apartments from 6 until the end of the night, so a little different if I was at home haha. But I agree I can't believe that we are back into the holiday season! That's fun about the World Series! We have got a little info from on of our investigators but not tons.

The last week was a pretty good one. We had Zone Training earlier in the week and we felt like it went pretty good. We talked a lot about faith and we got feedback that the missionaries really liked it. We talked about them having faith to find and baptize, but also having faith that if they tried their hardest and those things didn't happen that the Lord is still proud of them and their service. We used a lot from a talk by Elder Bednar where he asked a man if he had the faith enough to not be healed. As well as the Parable of the Seed Grown Secretly which is talked about in Jesus the Christ.

This week was a lot of checking on referrals, this area gets so many!! Tons of bible referrals for African names we can't even pronounce, so that's fun. This area is a really diverse area, lots of different cultures. As well it was a catch up week where we tried to get a hang of things with the YSA Ward since this is new to all of us. The ward has been covered by the Chinese missionaries as their English area but President changed it so language missionaries now just focus on their language program so we picked up the YSA ward (Glendale) as well as our family ward (College Park).

YSA is so weird, it kind of feels like hanging out with other kids and then taking about Jesus occasionally haha. But really I'm not use to talking to kids my age anymore, so this will be good to get me back closer to normal before I come home haha. And going to institute on campus is bomb! Holy cow I can't wait to go when I get home cause we get to go and it is so awesome!! Also YSA is tons of fun since I get to work with the Morgan's. Like yesterday I went on a mini split with the Morgan's to the YSA Ward Council and my comps stayed with an investigator in Sunday school. Luckily both wards share the chapel so it's not too bad but it does make for a long day, 7:30-4:30 at the church.

I do wanna share the story of one of our RC though. It's a long story so I'll give the abbreviated and maybe I can tell the full story at Christmas. So his name is Anwar and he's from Pakistan. So he was in the armed forces there and after he got out he started doing a lot of charity work for the Christians in the country. And some people there didn't like it, and he had a lot of close encounters. Long story short he's been shot, beat, and had his family threatened because of his belief in Christ. He became a religious refugee and got expressed a visa to get him to Bangkok, where there he was transferred to the US. When he got here he prayed for guidance, and no joke as he got up off his knees there was a knock at the door and there stood missionaries. He was then baptized on July 24th. It is so amazing to get to work with him and keep teaching him his new member discussions. His English is pretty broken as he's trying to learn, but he is such an amazing man. I'll get a picture with him this week and send it next week!

Hope you all have a great Halloween!!

Love you all!!
Love
Austin

We climbed the steeple at our chapel. It's just a ton

of ladders, quite the adventure!