February 1, 2016 -- Last Week in Johnson City

Well on the newest episode in the life of Elder Carlile.  Jay came to church and he loved it! He said it was a good place to feel relief from the world. It just adds to my testimony that church gives us a rest from our worldly troubles. All the members were super warm and welcoming to him which was great.  There was a good amount of fellowshipping going on.

Transfer calls came in this week and I'm going to..... ONEIDA. It's a super small town in between Syracuse and Utica but only 30 minutes outside of Utica. So I get to look forward to my first rural area of the mission after spending so long in bigger cities. It's a small branch there so that will be a change up from my first two areas where there were pretty big wards. My new companion has been out a transfer longer than I have so we're going to party and find the elect. I'll be sad to say goodbye to Johnson City but more importantly I'll be sad to say goodbye to Elder Ayre. It's been a good nine weeks with Elder Ayre and I have probably never laughed harder in my life. I taught him how to be the most bomb missionary ever and he really just only taught me how to cook barbeque chicken. Just kidding! He taught me a ton about missionary work and I'm grateful from the opportunity to learn from someone who is as knowledgeable and dedicated to the use of missionary skills. I'm really going to miss the missionaries in this unit too because we've all had to help each other pull through. The sisters have been so awesome at serving us and the elders have made preparation day basketball a pretty good competition. This will be my first ward that doesn't have 4 sets of missionaries every Sunday but instead only has one and I'm in it!

Otherwise, it was a pretty good week and I'll be sad to say goodbye to all of our investigators but I know that the work will still progress with them. It'll be exciting to see what happens this upcoming week. In the meantime the church is true, the sky is blue and life is good. Speaking of weather - it's been a little chilly lately. Last week got down to below zero with windchill but this week it is bumping back up to 60.

Keep on keepin' on,
Elder Joshua Carlile