General Conference Week

Hey family!

That's awesome that you've been in California this weekend. Ha I'd rather have the desert heat then the tropic anyday. But I hear Florida beaches are hard to beat, so we'll have to compare the two someday haha.

So it's been a pretty good week here. Some parts of it felt really slow, but I guess that's bound to happen every now and again. We had some crazy weather this week, which didn't help too much. I'm not sure if you heard, but on Thursday we had a really out of season storm. They had 70 mph winds, along with a ton of rain, and then tornado warnings to top it all off. We ended up having to stay inside almost all of Thursday becasue of that, but a tornado actually did touch down about five miles from our apartment. It was awesome to see all of that from the indoors though. Haha I went out on our back patio and took a video during some of it and I'll have to send it to you. Anyways, on Friday we had a zone leader meeting and so we went down to Sarasota for it. They asked Elder Moffett and I to sing during it, so we did Lord, I Would Follow Thee. It turned out well, and the training we got that day was great. We're focusing a lot on accountability in the mission and I think it'll bring good results. We seem to set goals sometimes that we forget about 10 minutes after we set them, so this way we'll be keeping them at the forefront of our work.

Conference this weekend was amazing! Hearing their council for us is an awesome experience because it always seems personalized. We've been promising our investigators this week that if they watch conference with a question in mind it'll be answered. On Saturday during the morning session we got a call from a number we didn't recognize. It was during one of the songs so we slipped out to answer. It turns out that this guy, Mike, had been on the mormon.org website and was curious about learning more. We explained that this weekend is a little bit different and we'd be hearing from the prophet and leaders of our church. He was excited about that and said he'd be there on Sunday morning. Well on Sunday morning we got to the church early to meet with Paige. She's really hard to get ahold of at times, so we were excited about the chance to. We started off the lesson talking about tithing, and then like so many of our lessons lately it turned right to baptism. She kept expressing the concern that she wasn't ready. Paige is really afriad of the chance that she'll fall away from the church if she joins and then goes to a college without many members. She has a testimony of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, so we know that she's ready. After trying to help her understand that we had to bring the lesson to a close, and asked her to pay special attention to the talks today and see if she gets her answer. Well President Uchtdorf was the first speaker, and his talk was handsdown written for her (and I'm sure others in the same situation). Waiting on the Road to Damascus was his topic, and he mentioned the "investigator waiting at the waters of baptism". I couldn't believe how well it was answered. After the session we talked to her, hoping she recognized what she'd heard. Sure enough, she know that her concerns had been addressed. We also found out that she applied to BYU-I and has been accepted! Haha I'm pretty sure that if she goes there she'll be held on the path. I'll keep ya posted though. Also, Mike did show up to the Sunday morning session as well. He's a really nice guy and he enjoyed what he heard. We have a lesson set up with him on Tuesday to teach him more about the church. Polly also attended that session of conference. I don't know if I've mentioned her before, but the missionaries started teaching here about a year ago but she wasn't making much progress and ended up getting dropped, but we've started working with her again and she really seems to be picking it up. Hopefully that continues.

Other then that, things are moving along. We haven't heard from Tony in a little while, so we're still trying to figure out what's going on there. Also we talked to Mark and Patsy this week and they're doing well. They were supposed to come to the afternoon session yesterday but didn't end up making it. We'll be checking up on them this week so I'll keep you posted.

Well I love you all! Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Kade Bartschi