Week 12 and 13

 Hi Friends and Family!

Week 12

This week was a blast. The highlight was General Conference. For those of you who don't know, General Conference is a biannual church-wide meeting in which the leaders of our church speak to us about how to become better people and how to follow God more effectively.

Our church leadership consists of a prophet and his two counselors, 12 apostles, and other leaders like the relief society presidency, the quorum of the 70 and others. This General Conference felt especially timely; many of the talks were directly related to COVID-19 and the state of affairs in our country and world. 

For those of you who didn't have a chance to watch it, I would highly recommend it! I always find it interesting and inspiring to hear the thoughts from accomplished and experienced people about God. I want to share the words from our prophet, Russel M. Nelson. We believe that he is the mouthpiece for God on Earth today. While we don't worship him, we give special attention to his words and try to follow his counsel. 

I would encourage you to learn about him. He is an amazing man; before being called into full-time church service, he was a world renowned heart-surgeon and helped develop the heart and lung machine that has saved countless lives. 

Russel M. Nelson spoke about the Hebraic meaning of "Israel". According to scholars, Israel translates to "Let God prevail". 

I want to give a little bit of background concerning Israel and the Abrahamic Covenant. Abraham was a prophet of God. God made a promise to A

braham that if he and the human family made and kept promises to be faithful, they would be blessed. This promise was given special attention by his grandson Jacob, whose name was later changed to Israel as a sign of his devotion to God. Israel had 12 sons and gave them unique responsibilities and authority to act in God's name. This is where we get the "12 tribes of Israel". While these 12 tribes of Israel remained faithful for a time, they eventually broke their sacred promises to God and in turn, God allowed them to be scattered (for example by the Asyrian and Babylonian invasions), but God mercifully promised to gather them someday in the future. 

Our church believes that the promised "Gathering of Israel" is happening right now. I want to be clear that Russel M. Nelson's message wasn't speaking out against the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather was a plea to "Let God Prevail" in our everyday lives. President Nelson taught that in order to gather Israel and reinstate the covenant between God and his children, we must allow God to prevail in our lives. We must hold up our end of the deal by making and keeping sacred promises with God to do good. Among these promises is a promise to promote love and respect amongst the human family. President Nelson said, "We are all children of God. God doesn't love one race more than another". 

Everyone has the opportunity to make sacred covenants to God and become part of Israel: the human family that has decided to "Let God Prevail" in their lives. Baptism and ordinances in holy temples are how people make these sacred promises to God to become part of Israel: to become part of letting God prevail.  

Week 13

This week has been another fun and rewarding week. 

We have done a lot of service these past few weeks. When people in the south hear about free labor, they do not hesitate to put you to work. Since being here, I have learned a lot about demolition, as well as how to frame a house, put walls up, put drywall up, put together a car-port, and I have gotten a lot of practice with moving furniture. We should be learning how to insulate a house any day now. While all of this manual labor is hard, it is also necessary to work off the nightly massive fried dinners that members so graciously and constantly feed us. I have attached a photo of one of the houses that we have been working on. We still have a lot of work to do, but we have made a lot of progress. On Saturday, we were putting up some walls for the house shown below, and I found myself accidentally standing in an anthill. My legs are now covered in fire-ant bites, but I now have another quintessential Floridian experience under my belt. 

The Blountstown-Bristol area spans two counties, and both have weekly food pantry days. We have been volunteering with both of them for the last few weeks, and it is amazing to see how much food we give out, especially with such a small population in both counties. People are so willing to serve and donate food. It is an amazing sight to behold. 

We have also started teaching some new people. It is such a joy to see people progress and learn about the church, but perhaps even more rewarding is being able to see the change in them as they strive to live better and more fulfilling lives. 

Love you all!

Elder Garff