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.
I hope you are doing well! Please don't hesitate to reach out!
Love you all,
Elder Garff
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