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 in the barren wilderness where Jesus went and 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 100 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 First Nephi

chapter three when Nephi is with his brothers and they have to go return to Jerusalem. But

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