israel 2013

A whole year ago already? Wow. I still remember the smell and feel of Tel Aviv air, the delicious coolness of the Mediterranean after hours and hours of traveling. I remember the odd lurch of my camel rising up onto all fours underneath me and the fascination of eating food with my fingers, seated on the ground in a tent with a half dozen feral cats lurking nearby. The tickle of sweat pouring down my back while hiking down the snake trail at Masada and the sting of the salt and minerals of the Dead Sea around my lips, despite keeping my head well above water. The perfect stillness of a pink sunrise over the Sea of Galilee, the lush green humidity of the Golan Heights and the Tel Dan Nature Reserve, the acres and acres of golden hills rolling away from every side of the Herodian. In Jerusalem—my favorite place—Ben Yehuda Street came to life with music and dancing every night; the narrow alleys of the Old City buzzed with spice-scented markets and a tangle of Hebrew, Arabic, and English conversations; the Temple Mount stood in a kind of reverent silence, broken by soft voices and Muslim prayers.

I go through my pictures and that sense of awe comes back… that incredible realization that this is God’s holy land. It draws me in, and I ache to see it all again.

an adventurous life

 

“An adventurous life does not necessarily mean climbing mountains, swimming with sharks or jumping off cliffs. It means risking yourself by leaving a little piece of you behind in all those you meet along the way.”                                                                                                                            - unknown

The longer I live and the more I travel (though I can't say I have much of either one behind me yet), the more intensely aware I am of the temporal nature of life. Friends change in both appearance and personality as the blade of time carves away at them; sometimes, they walk away altogether and leave a gap behind. Circumstances shift with the paradoxically erratic regularity of seashells at the mercy of the tides. Even places, which seem so static, take on subtle new attributes or lose dear old ones as society around and within them is altered—or, perhaps, as my own experiences reshape my perspectives.

Changes like these both excite me and sadden me. With every beginning, I know I have to brace myself for a goodbye. With every new place I experience, I know that I will leave part of myself there in the end. I can love an inexhaustible number of places at any one time, but I can only be in one of them; I will forever have a loneliness and longing for somewhere, and I will forever be fighting the evanescence of those memories.

My world is much bigger now than it was twelve months ago. It stretches from coast to coast, from the northwest extreme of the continental United States all the way to the southeastern corner. It zigzags up to Pennsylvania and back. It even reaches to the other side of the world. Now, I can hear a snippet of the song “Kiss Me Slowly” and be walking down the snowy December road in Goldendale; yet when “Rhythm of Love” comes up on my iPod, it takes me to the downtown Sebring sidewalk that I used to walk or run nearly every single day. A sultry-hot sunrise, and I am in Melbourne again, just beginning my GCBI year; when the night is cool and breezy with clear, starry skies, it's a traditional Fourth of July at Sam’s parents’ house. Even the scent of coconut-lime perfume means Florida, while vanilla-sugar means Christmastime at home and coconut bodywash means summer in Pennsylvania. And then I barely even have to imagine the throaty sound of Hebrew being spoken, and instantly my surroundings transform into the light beige stones of Old City Jerusalem.

Whether I'm in Washington, Florida, Pennsylvania, or Israel, I can be taken somewhere else for a fleeting instant, and it reminds me that I am invested in more than one place—that a piece of my heart is buried under a mossy Florida oak somewhere, while another is tucked safely between the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That I love and am loved by a family far bigger than my biological one. I too am changing. I too am being carved by the blade of time, carefully wielded in the hand of God. Day by day He molds me and refines me. Pieces are trimmed off and left in the places I've been, a testimony to His continual work in my heart and life—wherever He takes me.

 

There are moments which mark your life. Moments when you realize nothing will ever be the same and time is divided into two parts: before this, and after this.

the final day : the temple mount, western wall, and via dolorosa

 

I feel like I don’t have the words to really describe this day. The temple mount where God chose to place His Holy Presence for the Israelites in the past; the Western Wall where His chosen people have cried out to Him for so many years; the Via Dolorosa that remembers the suffering of the Messiah at the hands of the Jews… it just hit me again and again how important it is to remember God’s story and to proclaim it to the world.

The most impactful moment of this day was also the most unlikely. Our group clustered into an upper floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, crammed with hundreds of other tourists who wanted to see the same artwork and touch the same patch of Calvary’s bedrock. Pastor Randy only said one thing up there before we hurried down to make way for more tourists, and it was this: “Somewhere within twenty-five feet of where you’re standing, God saved the world.”

Wrap your mind around that one.

holy land tour, day ten : the old city

It makes me sad how unobservant my generation seems to be. Arts like listening, people watching, and even silence have become at least obsolete. As I sat on the corner of a couch in the vast lobby of my hotel in Jerusalem this evening, I noticed that of the four other people sitting nearby, three were on their phones in some way and one was asleep—only I sat in total silence, totally unoccupied with anything but what was going on around me.

In fact, people watching characterized my entire day. We had the day off from touring, so my friends and I walked back to the Old City to do some exploring on our own. I wanted a chance to do some low-key street photography without the rush of sightseeing, so I made my way from the Jaffa Gate area through to Damascus Gate (in the Moslem Quarter), and simply smelled the different scents, listened to the different languages, and took note of the different people.



I smelled more spices than I could identify, mixed with the smoke of hookahs and the sourness of trash in the alleys. I watched the different interactions of both foreigners and locals, and saw long lines of Israeli Defense Force soldiers moving through the markets. I noticed the warm hospitality of the hopeful shopkeepers and the prickly harshness of the ones who had been offended by the carelessness of a tourist. And I managed to get through the whole day without losing any money or camera accessories to the “birds”!

I love this city. I never thought I’d say that about any big city anywhere—but this one feels so different from the others that I’ve been to. There’s something about not being able to understand what those around you are saying that sharpens your other senses. There’s something about the dark, narrow alleys full of strange people that sharpens your alertness. And just trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I’m half a world away from anywhere familiar is kind of cool, too.