Hello Family!

Well it's been another good week here in Citrus Ridge. By the way, Citrus Ridge isn't actually a town, just what the ward is called. Our area covers Davenport, Champions Gate, a little bit of Kissimmee, and some of Polk City. Pretty big area, just not very densely populated haha.

A lot of tracting was the routine again this week, but we had some pretty awesome experiences. That's one thing that I really like about tracting is seeing the huge range of people that are out there. We met an older retired man named Wayne, and he invited us right in. He lives by himself and was probably just looking for someone to talk to, and fortunately for him, that's what we're good at. Ha he told us that he sits in a religious chat room for hours and hours a day, so he was pretty interested in talking to us. He asked a lot of questions and we gave him really straight forward answers. He really liked talking to us and told us that he has a Book of Mormon and he'll start reading it. Before we left he was laughing and told us that "I'll have some great things to say about your church in the chat room today. I just can't wait to see what the response is!" haha. It was pretty funny. Besides Wayne, we met an older couple. Their names are Chris and Irene Pajoni (like "Poor Johnny" is what they said haha). Chris is in his eighties and he's been a Freemason since he was in his twenties. I asked him about it and he was more then happy to give me the run down. Pretty neat to hear about, and they sound like they've lead awesome lives. Their daughter is the vice president of UPS in California and is a multi-millionaire. Haha everyone has a story and I love hearing about it. They were extremely nice though and Irene promised to attend church with us in a couple of weeks. After we had shared a scripture and prayed with them it really started to pour outside. We'd parked just a couple housed down so we assure them that we'd be fine running back to our car. They weren't about to let us leave in that though, and absolutely insisted that he would drive us. Haha so we got in the car and Chris drove us down three houses to our car. Pretty awesome people.

So there's this couple that we've been meeting with for the last couple of weeks. Originally we had been looking for a former investigator that previous missionaries had written down, but they had written the address down wrong. We ended up talking to this guy named Pat for about an hour, and he was pretty interested in hearing what we had to say. The next time we came back his wife, Jocely, was there as well. One of her best friends is LDS and she actually knew a bit about the church. They want evidence from the Bible for everything that we tell them, but they're really inquisitive/nice about it. Ha well we visited them on Thursday again and shared the First Vision experience with them. It was a pretty big pill for Pat to swallow, but "for the sake of learning more" he let it pass. Ha but while we were there Jocely made us tacos and we were able to have dinner with them. Dinner and a lesson with investigators? That's the way to do things I've decided. Now if we only had more investigators....haha but that's what we're slowly but surely working on. There's a few members of the ward that have friends that are interested in learning more about the church. We're really praying that we'll have opportunities to teach them a little bit. It's all about patience and timing and so that's what I'm trying to remember.

Have a good week and know that I'm praying for you all! I love you guys and look forward to hearing about this coming week!

Love you all,

Elder Kade Bartschia