Jon the Baptist.

Beth Shean

This picture above was taken as Beth-Shean.  One of the major cities of the Old Testament where Saul went ant took over.  It was a really beautiful city full of many different layers of time.  You had the time of Israel ruling, Egypt ruling, Persia, and then the grand pillars of Rome as you can see in the back.

These past two weeks have been absolutely crazy.  Having had a 4 day trip to Galilee really made a mess of every other class.  Though of course I don’t mind, I mean, I got to go stay at a hotel and learn about the Galilee for 11 hours a day.  We basically wake up at 6 am, eat breakfast, then head out on the bus making stops wherever our teacher has planned.  This goes on until 6pm or 7pm. We write notes, we take pictures, we stand in the sun, we stand in the rain and learn!

B-e-a-utiful

Galilee was one of the most beautiful places we have been so far.  It actually reminded me much of Canada, minus the really huge mountains all over the place.  We hiked up Mt. Arad where there were cows all over the place and really amazing flowers.  It is prime season time for all the wild flowers to be out, so basically you are walking through a garden the whole time.  But as well as hiking I was able to find a nice rock and think about stuff as I like to do.  Thinking about how Jesus grew up in this area and seeing why God chose it.  I mean I’m sure there were greater eternal reasons, but just to think about the smaller things like perhaps he chose it for its beauty and abundance of agricultual possibilities.  Jesus was able to grow up in and area that has been one of the most beautiful I have ever seen…  The smells alone would make me want to live there.  People kept making fun of me because I would be sniffing the whole time.  I love smells.  Smell of open air, flowers, and sweat!  haha.

Me and Stephen Carr Eating at our Hostel / Hotel

It has been really encouraging and fun to be around a group of people my age.  Basically everyone here is either 21 or 20.  We have been able to really connect and do amazing things together.  Though we have been together for only two months now, it is amazing to see how close we can come having God as our basis for what we are doing.  Just the other day we had some visitors who were Christians but going to a secular school and living the non-Christians.  They said the thing they loved the most about coming to our school was the people that love God.  They were able to be encourage just by being around us.  It made me really see just how important it is to have those around you who love God and are seeking him.  Perhaps I have taken it for granted because I have been around them for basically the past 3 years.  Quest, Trek, School, Jerusalem, next…Camp Malibu.

Our Classroom...

Well, I’ve got about a month a half to go.  I will be praying and hoping for the best back home.  God Bless!

I just had one of the most amazing weekends of my life. We did our first three day trip. We went all over Judah: Beth-shemesh, Beer-sheva, Masada, the Dead Sea, and much more.  The only thing is I forgot my camera in my room…  But I’ll get pictures from my roommate soon enough so I can remeber and show the places.  I’ve never gone in water before where you actually don’t have to do anything to stay afloat.  It was one of the weirdest sensations I’ve ever experienced.  You stand in the water without moving, and you stay there…  One interesting fact is that if you try to cross it you would dehydrate before makeing it because the wating your own body will want to go into the Sea to make it less salty.  It’s 38% Salt…  But we did the mud bath and everything as well a group of us found a hole with gross smelling mud that apparently is really good for your skin and put it all over.  It stunk and crusted making my skin feel weird, but it didn’t seem to make my complexion any softer, if I may say so.

Jerusalem Walk

Things have been interesting as of late.  It seems the longer I am here the more I see the difference of what going in a culture to do ministry looks like and what going into a culture to study looks like.  I am constantly tied between wanting to serve, yet I struggle to even find time to leave the school.  I serve those around me… though it seems my passion just isn’t as fervent when I have the ever pressing assignments in the back of my mind.  I’m trying different things like waking up early to spend the first time of my day with the Lord… Yet without service on my mind it seems something is missing.  I do my homework with God in mind, yet I still feel that it is not enough…  I’m seeing patterns of what happens when I don’t serve.  I begin to forget what God has done for me and through me.  I forget those thing that I once would tell at every moments chance.  Maybe it’s because people here are all so biblically informed that I feel I don’t need to share…  Maybe it’s because I am not spending as much time focused one God as I should…  Or maybe the route of all these negative thoughts is because I am not serving and loving those around me.

I found great encourgement today in talking with an elderly man who teaches at the school.  He just has stories upon stories that I love to listen to.  Though it wasn’t just the stories that held my attention, but the lesson of simplicity and humility.  Here is a man who has been teaching 40 years before I was even thought of yet.  He is nearing the ending years of his life.  He made it… some might say…  I’ve been pondering what I am trying to get at here for the past 5 mins…  But an sense of peace came over me as I listened.  We were able to talk about meaningful things, not just funny stories from our pasts (as much talking has been with the youth around me).  His comfort of being able to still sit with me even though we would both not being saying anything…  His peace about telling stories that we both knew wern’t that funny, though we would laugh anyways for the sake of laughing.  It is this comfort that I was able to grasp for a while as I talked with him.  The rememberance that someday I will make it…  Someday I will be able to tell stories that were years past those that I am telling them to…  Someday I will be so close to death that worrying would be confined only to eternity and not to what I am going to do with my time here…  Worry will have gotten old…  I will have seen its face for so many years that eventually gotten used to it and no longer bothered to acknowledging it.  There is something very wise in one who is old…  Not just their words…  But because they see like very different then a young buck like myself.  They have gone through the trials that seemed like a lifetime at the time…  The ones I go through.  They have gone through the doubts…  I ones I am yet to face…  They have gone through life and found out how complex such a simple thing as life tries to get.  God told us to respect our elders… maybe there was more to it then just a rule, but a blessing in the waiting.  Maybe the intention of respecting our elders is not only because they require help to do the simple at times, but because they have made it.  They know they how precious time is, and how much of a waste it is when we give it to worry…

Me laughing in a tree

I can’t wait to be old…  Though maybe I can start being old now… hah!

Well!  Things are going superb as of today.  The weather is around the 20 and I’m finally getting long periods of time in the sun.  This upcoming weekend we are going on a three day feild study to the Negev, Dead Sea, and Southern Judah in general.  We get to go swimming, (or should I say floating) in the Dead Sea.  The salt content is so high that you can’t actually stay under very easily.  I wouldn’t mind getting a jar of Dead Sea water and bringing it home… It would make for some good drinking…

This past weekend, as the pictures posted, we went to Northern Israel all around Samaria.  It was a great trip of seeing old things and celebrating the new.  There were three birthdays within a one week period, so we celebrated them on the bus.  These past week we must have sung happy birthday 15 times.  Once for every meal for every person. Samaria was one of the most beautiful places in all of Israel.  Many places actually looked like BC with loads of greenery and trees.  Northern Israel is actually quite green…  It is crazy to see the contrast.  Literally it will be dessert on one side of a hill and totally green on the other.  All the hills and mountains make for some crazy humidity levels and crazy rain whether.  So much of the life depends on the rain here that if there is none then living here is almost impossible.

Bus Birthday

This past week has been a climax in a lesson God has been showing me.  Though it was a really hard one to go through… it was very necessary.  It was the lesson of experiential faith verses text faith.  That is, faith that is encouraged by experience something, and then finding the explanation of it in the Bible verses faith that is encouraged through trusting what the text says about it even without experiencing it.  This whole past few weeks it seems my view of Jesus has been trampled on.  Having teachers that are Jewish who can prove Jesus as false with really good reasoning…  Having teachers that used to be Muslim, that just the same can prove both Jews and Christians wrong with good reasoning…  Reading books about people that experience intimacy with God without believing that Jesus actually is God…  Writing papers about people who even claim Jesus as God, yet still live their lives totally different then I would even imagine.  There were these people called Stylists in the Eastern church who would stand on poles for reminder to pray.  One guy stood atop for 38 years…  38 Years!  I don’t know if I wrote about this in a previous blog… but it just seems to be way out of my league.  What am I to believe about Jesus?  What am I to believe about hearing his voice?  Am I sure that I am hearing it when all he calls me to do is read the Bible and pray…  Or is my imagination getting the best of me…  Am I just trying so hard to hear God, that I am making things up?  …Perhaps I am exaggerating a bit…  But these questions are thrown in your face simply by walking through the city.  You see three section of people just as passionate as the other as to their experiences and their written text.  It has ripped my idea of experiencail faith into peices.  Or should I say God has…  It has been a hard lesson because no longer can I simply rely on telling people that God is real because I have experienced this and that…  No longer will I put my trust in such experiences in order for my faith to grow.  Though I will never forget them for remeberance of God’s faithfulness sake…  but it will no longer define my faith.  My faith… as God reminded me so graciously… is in Jesus…  If I were to begin going on the trail of experience over text, then where would my faith go?  If I were to base my faith on experience, then would it even be faith?  Would it not then only be something that I have to see to believe?  It would be based off proof rather than faith.

Looking at Mt. Ebal (right), & Mt. Gerizin (left), Shechem in the middle.

One of the biggest questions that I am waiting for God to convince my heart of is: What makes a follower of Jesus different?  if Muslims are just as worried about the poor as Christians…  If Jews are just as worried about interpretation as our leading Jesus-professing interpreters…  If there are thousands of people that experience intimacy with God without the means of Jesus… Then what is Jesus?  Perhaps you can see why my idea of experiencial faith has been crushed…  For there are many things that simply cannot be answered by experience.  There are things that only trust in the text can explain.  For if my faith is only based on experience then I will forever be stuck on the path that God let me experience for a few days here.  A path with no direction.  A path with no real truth.  A path with no real hope…  A path that just goes in a great big circle.  And man, was even a few days on that path hard.  I felt so lost.  I tried simply letting go of the Bible to see what would happen.  Thankfully the Lord kept to his promise to bring my back.  It reminded me of what my life was like before God truely revealed himself to me throught the base of his word, and the confirmation of his experiencial gift.

The Bible is the foundation…  Without it, experience can never be classified.  Without it, experience can prove anything.  Without it, you will never know if it truly is Jesus you are experiencing, or simply a counterfit trying to steal you away from the true vine.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful… Remain in me, and I will remain in you.  No branch can bear fruit by itself…”   — Jesus

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patients, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”

Interesting that God proved it to me by showing me what happens when you take for granted being in the vine and then try living without it…  As soon as I let go I stopped desiring love.  Let me never take for granted being in the vine…  Let me never take for granted that I have access to the foundation of truth: the Bible.

Samaritans (They still exist) There of 800 of them left...