Hey everyone!!
This has been a really good week for us in Citrus Ridge! We had a zone conference, met with some awesome investigators, and of course made some friends from the UK.
We had our zone conference on Thursday, and that was a pretty awesome experience. President has a lot of love for each of his missionaries. We were all waiting for a bit of rebuke coming our way, but we didn't any from him. He told us that he only wants us to do what's right so that we can be fully blessed in our efforts to bring souls unto Christ. Pretty amazing guy if you ask me. It was only a mini zone conference because next month we'll have another zone conference with Elder Kikuchi from the seventy! He'll probably focus on being exactly obedient from 6:30 till 10 in the morning (waking up and studies basically). Also it was pretty awesome to have a good meal prepared by the local relief society. I wish it could have been cooking by some of my own family or that Hawaiian food didn't sound too shabby either, but it was pretty great.
Well in order to build our teaching pool here we decided that it would be productive to call some of the people that were in our area book. I was extremely surprised when at the end of calling a bunch of people we had 5 appointments set up! Ha but two of them have been especially positive. The first is Marinette. She's a Jamaican/Haitian lady that met with the missionaries about a year ago. Her story of coming into contact with the church is pretty amazing. It was around Christmas time last year and she was driving home from a really long day at work. Suddenly she had the impression that she needed to stop at a church...well the first one she came to was ours. Normally there aren't people handing around in the church at 7 pm on an ordinary weekday, but she walked in and saw the ward choir practicing for their Sunday performance. When Marinette heard them all singing the Christmas songs she got down on her knees by the pew and started to cry and pray. Now fast-forwarding to present time, she's more then happy to talk with us as missionaries. She can't make it to church because she always has to work, but we'll be teaching her and hopefully we can find some time to get her to attend a church service. The next one we came into contact with was Eddie Rig. He's a big black guy with a deep bass voice. Elder Kitchen has a really deep voice, but this guy made him sound like a squeaky twelve year old boy (sorry Blake and Stockton...haha). Well he had ordered a DVD from the church about a year ago but it had never been delivered to him. We were able to take it over to him, and the guy really warmed up to us. He kept asking us questions about the church, and we ended up teaching him the entire first lesson. We started telling him about the Book of Mormon, and he said, "Now that is a book I'd definitely read!" haha. He also promised us that he'd attend church with us next week. We're really praying that he's able to come.
Well Cheryl Comini got baptized! I wasn't able to make it back to the baptism which really bummed me out, but I hear it was amazing. I called her yesterday to congratulate her, and she was so excited. "I'm all clean!" is what she told me, and I know that she really is. He husband was less active for a long time before she started to investigate the church, but he's been going with her and the kids and he was able to baptize her! They're an amazing family. Definitely people that will be my good friends for a long time.
Wow, I can't believe you guys are already getting ready for school to start! This is the first time in 13 years that I'm not getting all ready for another school year....haha and it feels pretty weird, but in a good way. I guess I better enjoy not having school while I can! All of the kids in Florida go back in a couple weeks and I know that none of them are very excited about it. But it will be nice to have everyone in our ward back from vacation! There's a couple people that we're waiting to work with because they've been out of town for a while. Having everyone back into the swing of things will make it easier on us to get some missionary work done.
I love all of you! Have an awesome week, and good luck starting school! Work hard academically, but make sure you're staying up on your scripture studies too. There's so much that I'm learning about the gospel, and the more I learn the more I know that it's all true.
I love you!
Elder Kade Bartschi


Hey these pictures are of my favorite doors (no soliciting haha)And then remember Braydn's letter she sent to Japan?? Well I got it this week! Haha it was pretty dang hilarious

This was the sunset last night. Pretty cool, huh??