Week 19

Hi Friends and Family!

On Tuesday I was able to go to the Orlando temple with my parents! The temple is an amazing place. There is a quiet spirit about it that fills your soul with peace, love, and joy. 

In the temple, you make promises to God and receive blessings for keeping those covenants. You also learn about God's plan for us.

For my friends in Los Angeles, I would encourage you to take a socially distanced walk around the temple grounds in Westwood! I have done this many times, and I always feel a sense of peace and love for God when I am there. I don't believe the Temple visitors center is open yet, but when it opens, I would definitely check it out. There are missionaries there that can explain more about the temple!

After my parents and I went through the temple, we got lunch and walked around a nature preserve in Orlando. As we walked on a bridge overlooking swampland, we saw two baby alligators and a ton of interesting plants, trees, and insects.

I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to speak with them in person! Most missionaries go without seeing their parents on their mission, but the church encourages your family to be with you during your first visit through the temple. The LA Temple was shut down (due to covid) when I would have gone through, so I got lucky and was able to see my parents during my mission! See photos below!

On Thursday we had the opportunity to hear from the Prophet of our church. He talked about the healing power of gratitude. If you haven't seen his video, check it out. He is an amazing man. As a man of science, he is a world renowned heart surgeon, and he was a major part of the development of the heart and lung machine. As a man of God, he leads the church that I feel so grateful to be a part of. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51gcWCs-Ho

As the holidays are quickly approaching, Elder Clove and I are busy at work preparing for different holiday themed activities. We have been dropping Thanksgiving boxes of food to members in need, and we are busy at work planning a stocking drive for less active families in our ward. 

WEEK 18

Hello Friends and Family!

Bristol is beginning to feel like home. I am getting used to the endless trees, the little dirt roads, and the people missing fingers and teeth. When I drove to Jacksonville to pick up Elder Clove a couple weeks ago, I found it funny as I realized that seeing buildings taller than one story, highways wider than two lanes, and the hustle and bustle of a city felt somewhat foreign to me.

I am excited to go back to "the scary big city of Jacksonville" (as it is known around here), as I leave for a temple trip! I am preparing to drive to Jacksonville tonight and will head to Orlando tomorrow morning. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to go through the Orlando temple tomorrow! Part of this blessing includes being able to visit with my parents briefly! I imagine my next email will have more to say on this.

This week has been wonderful. We had a tradeoff (a one-day swap with other missionaries) on Tuesday, and we had a zone conference on Friday. It was fun to have the chance to visit with other missionaries. I always find zone conferences to be marvelous. A zone conference is a day long meeting that talks about how we can become better missionaries. I always come away from these meetings feeling enthused and excited about the opportunity I have to serve the people of Bristol.   

While this week has been a fairly standard week of missionary work, I recognize that I have neglected to mention some of the fun routine things that we do each week. 

We have been helping out at a local food bank, and it has helped us establish good relationships with the members of the community. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, we help package and distribute food to people in need. It is amazing to see how much good this program does. Every week there are cars lined up for as far as the eye can see, and in a small town, this is especially impressive. We hand out food for anywhere between 120-180 households at every drive.  

Historically, there have been some hard feelings between our church and the other churches in the area. We have sought to remedy this by meeting with a local Baptist preacher. We discuss differences in our doctrine, but we also discuss how we can unite the community. He wrote an article titled Why I Love my Mormon Neighbors, which was a real honor, and also push towards a spirit of unity in the town of Bristol. We are working on filming an interview that shows how we can discuss the differences in our beliefs in a spirit of love and friendship rather than contention.  See the link below. 

https://brocodywatson.wixsite.com/myblog/post/why-i-love-my-mormon-neighbors?fbclid=IwAR0hnWEXg4WS8faiKZk3iqJjX0gBJFaGy-3R7yMrWgRMg9sz63hM8stfozM

I hope you are doing well! Please don't hesitate to reach out!

Love you all,

Elder Garff 

Week 17

 Hello Friends and Family!

I hope you are all doing well! This week has been a blast. It is amazing to think that time has flown so quickly!

With this last week came many fun and exciting new experiences. We volunteered at the Gulf Coast Ironman on Saturday with the youth in our ward, and I was amazed by the tenacity of these athletes. An ironman begins with a 2.4 mile swim, then a 112 mile bike ride, and then a marathon on foot. Each of these events are surely impressive by themselves, and the idea of completing them back to back in one day seems unbelievable. 

We were assigned to hand out water bottles and snacks around mile 80 of the bike race portion. We would hold out water bottles, and bikers would ride by and grab them. It seems that because of the speed they would ride past us, most of the water bottles were missed. They were just slapped out of our hands. As time went on, the bikers got a little slower and the water bottle conversion rate got higher and higher. 

I cannot get over how impressive these athletes were. We witnessed several accidents where people fell and were injured. For the most part, they would get up instantly, and keep going. People would ride by us bleeding and exhausted, their clothes torn from a bad fall, but they refused to quit. As they rode by, their smiles, fist pumps in the air, and happy exclamations were contagious, but also shocking! Despite still having 30 miles of biking and a marathon to run, these athletes had committed to push themselves and they had committed to do it with joy!

Many lessons can be learned from these bikers about determination and will power, but to me, nothing stands out more than their optimism and unfettered joy. I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days. Towards the beginning of the race, the vast majority of bikers - many bleeding and clearly exhausted - would yell "Thank you" or some other similar joyful phrase towards us. Towards the back of the pack, many of these ironmen and ironwomen stopped to use the restrooms and refill their water bottles. I had the opportunity to speak to some of them, and still, I was amazed at their joy and optimism despite such difficult circumstances. I imagine some of this was due to endorphins, but nonetheless it was an amazing sight to behold!  

It seems to me that they felt this joy because they recognized that what they were doing was right, and they recognized that their discomfort was temporary. In other words, they recognized that the reward of having successfully completed the race was worth the pain and suffering that completing an Ironman requires.

To me, Christ's life and ministry is the reason we can have joy amidst difficult circumstances.  As we rely on His atonement, we recognize that our trials are only temporary, and we know that through enduring them honorably, we are able to return to live with Him again. In this way, Christ's atonement allows us to return to live with Him again. Christ's atonement allows our reward in heaven (of having successfully completed our mortal journey on Earth) to be worth the difficult times that we will experience on Earth.  

When we are utilizing His atonement, joy is the only rational reaction when we are faced with a seemingly impossible task. His atonement allows us to be reunited with family members who have passed on, and His atonement allows us to always have someone to lean on. Christ's atonement enables us to bear our burdens with joy. 

A couple years ago, I got a gig to play saxophone at a wedding reception. The couple was being married in a Greek Orthodox church, and knowing virtually nothing about the Greek Orthodox religion, I decided to check out the service. At the end of the ceremony, the Priest said something very profound. He said that there is a difference between happiness and joy: happiness is fleeting, and joy is everlasting. He explained, "Marriage doesnt always bring day to day happiness. Marriage should however, bring long-term joy." 

While he was specifically talking about marriage, I believe this concept applies to far more situations. I believe it applies to the Ironman race and also to our journey through life on Earth. I don't believe that the athletes in the Ironman always felt happy. I'm sure that as they swam against the current, and biked up hills, they were unhappy. But, I do believe that they always felt joy.

My hope is that through Christ's atonement, we are able to feel an unrelenting sense of joy. We will not always feel happiness. There will be moments where we are disappointed, frustrated, and we feel lost, but these moments will hurt less and will flee quicker as we recognize the joy that comes through Christ. 

It is my hope that whenever we are in a tough situation, we instinctively react with joy. When we have metaphorically swam 2.4 miles, biked 80, and still have to run a marathon to run; when we are bleeding and exhausted; and when we don't know how we can keep moving forward; we will look at our situation, widen our perspective, realize that our discomfort is temporary, relish in all of the things we can learn through those difficult times, and recognize that this relief comes through Christ. 

I love you all, and I hope that you have a wonderful week!

Love, 

Elder Garff 

Week 16

 Hello Friends and Family!

This week has been crazy but wonderful! A lot of people in the mission were quarantined, so our transfer calls were postponed. We heard about our assignments early Thursday morning, and we had to prepare to leave by that afternoon!

Elder Murri was assigned to finish his mission in the same place he started: Palatka, FL. My assignment was to stay in Bristol and train a brand new missionary!

On Thursday afternoon Elder Murri and I said our goodbyes, and I drove to Jacksonville with Elder Mecum (another missionary assigned to train) to pick up our trainees. We stopped to get an oil change and pizza in Tallahassee, and after a 4 hour oil change, we were back on the road. We arrived in Jacksonville Beach late on Thursday night, and we stayed with the Elders there. They didn't have enough beds for us, so Elder Mecum (a 6'9" basketball player for the University of Utah) slept on a very 5' long couch - quite a funny sight to behold - and I slept on the tile floor which wasn't as funny for me.

On Friday morning we had a meeting with President Wood for all the new trainers, and then we met the new missionaries we would be training. I was assigned to train Elder Clove from St. George, UT. He is an awesome companion. He just finished high school and loves to play soccer. We drove back to Bristol and got to work. 

I have had a lot of fun showing Elder Clove around Bristol. While I've been here for 3 months, with all of the craziness surrounding corona virus, there are still plenty of members that I don't know. We spent the last couple of days getting to know more of the members, and it has been great. 

I hope you all have wonderful weeks and are doing well!

Love you guys,

Elder Garff

Elder Murri and our Baptist Preacher friend in front of our house