A few years ago my wife and I were lucky enough to go to the Holy Land over in Israel.

Although I had spent over a decade teaching and writing about the scriptures related to Palestine and other places in the Old and New Testament.

I had never actually seen the Judean Desert or the shores of the sea of Galilee.

When I got there, I was blown away at the green lushness of the Galilean Valley

and the barren wilderness where Jesus went

fasted for 40 days.

One interesting thing that happened when I got there is I immediately started seeing insights

into scriptures that I had never had before.

Like when Jesus resurrects and his apostles are in Jerusalem, he tells the women to go tell

the apostles to meet him in Galilee.

I had usually just blown past that verse like he was telling him to meet him around the corner.

But when you're there, you realize how far away Galilee is from Jerusalem. It's over a hundred miles to the north.

He was telling them to take a multiple day journey to do a lot of work to go see him

as a resurrected being in a place that was a little more safe and

secluded than Jerusalem was. I gained a new insight from knowing the

geography. Another neat one that happened was we were in a bus and I was with a local tour guide and I mentioned something that we were getting ready to go to Jerusalem.

The tour guide turned to me and he said,

Brother Sweat, when we say that we're going to Jerusalem,

we always say we're going up to Jerusalem.

He said because Jerusalem is up in elevation and you have to go up on all sides from the mountains to get there and it's also symbolic of Jerusalem as like the holy highest city.

Well interestingly enough later that night I happen to be reading in 1st

Nephi chapter 3 when Nephi is with his brothers and they have to go return to

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