Jon the Baptist.

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!