Hey Family!

It sounds like you all had a great week at home! Congrats on the district championship win, Whit and Brayd, and it was great hearing about Britta as well. And Blake.....I'm sure things are going well for you too haha. Wrestling practice, maybe?

Anyways, it's been a good week here as well. We were able to have some really solid lessons with people, with some return appointments (that's always helpful). There's a guy named Luis that we've been trying to contact for about a month. His wife is a member of the church, and we had met him once before. He wasn't answering our phone calls anymore, and so we decided to stop by and try to visit him. Well we caught him right on his way out and he invited us to come back the next morning. We showed up the next day, and he really poured out some of his struggles to us. He has to go meet with the immigration board on Thursday to find out if they'll be sending him back to Peru or not. He has a job here along with a wife and kid. The poor guy is on the verge of losing his mind it seems, and the only thing we could do is reassure him that everything will work out. We shared some scriptures with him, and it really seemed to calm him down. After that he asked us if we could come back and pray with him on Wednesday (the day before he finds out), and then he'd like to start "seriously" taking the lessons. Luis is a really great guy, and I'm praying that this will just be a wake up call for him.

Also this week we were able to to get three of the less active people we've been working with to church! We've been teaching Bro. Termini for over the past month, and he showed up to church! We were really excited to see him there because he's been telling us for weeks and weeks that he'd show up soon. His goal is to baptize his daughter in May, and coming to church was definitely a good first step. Also, one of the families in our ward brought their friend for the second week in a row. She's 9 and her name is Kiara. Apparently she loved it last week, so this week she woke herself up, got dressed, and over to their house on her own in time to ride with the family to come to church. I was a little nervous this week because we were asked to speak in sacrament meeting this week as well. I spoke on convert conversion, and I really didn't want to say something dumb that would turn away any of the people checking out the church. Unfortunately the people who said they'd come weren't able to, but I think that the talk went pretty well.

E. Larson and I have really been doing well together though! A lot of good work has been taking place, which is evident by the fact that we got kicked out of two neighborhoods, and threatened to get kicked out of two more. Ha I've never seen people that forceful or mean about us tracting, so I told E. Larson it must be his charm on people. But despite that we were able to pick up a couple of new investigators this last week as well. One is the grandson of a member, and we're pretty excited to work with him. We had a short lesson with him on saturday and he payed attention really well. That's a big plus seeing as how he's a 9 yr old little boy with lots of energy.

The ward Halloween activity is coming up on Saturday, so we're hoping that we'll be able to get a couple of investigators there to meet some members. We really do have a good ward, and so I know that if the people we're teaching would just meet some of the members they'd enjoy themselves.

I love you guys and can't wait to hear how everything goes this week!

Love,
Elder Kade Bartschi