Shalom/Salam

Almost one week later...I finally have some free time to write a quick post. Flew into Tel Aviv, Israel, last Monday morning. We hit the ground running as fast as we could, and just increased the pace from there :)

Where to begin? Good news: so when I was imagining this trip I figured it would be me, my parents, and a group of older/middle-aged retired peeps with enough money to tour around Israel for three weeks. Figured on a lot of alone time and a lot of (boring) adult convo... Turns out, the class we're in is taught by a prof from Azusa Pacific, and thus 80ish% of the students are undergrads. And I'd say it's a 3 to 1 girl to guy ratio. So let me just break it down for you: I'm hanging out in Israel with a bunch of college kids only slightly younger than me, all from Cali, and mostly girls. It's been rough.

Bonus: there are numerous kids as fanatical about the World Cup as I. Double bonus: I'm in a country where every other back alley has a big screen projector playing every game aired. There is nothing quite like sitting with a pint of Maccabees and a hookah, eating a shwarma, and watching the World Cup with a bunch of Arabs.

But seriously, I'm very thankful. I've made some incredible friends already. It makes the days easier, because they are looooooong as hades. The typical day is something like this: 7am breakfast. 8am to 12pm we're in class (snore). 1pm through 6pm we walk/hike around ALL of Israel. And I mean all. We made walking around the Old City of Jerusalem look like a Sunday stroll. We'll walk (insert "jog") to a place, stop, listen to Bob the Prof explain its significance, and then keep walking for around five more hours. 7pm dinner. 9:30pm World Cup. 12am bedtime. Six hours until I do it all again... Needless to say, I end each day shattered. But it is unbelievable all the same. I've seen too much to remember, from Calvary, to Herod's Palace, to Bethlehem, to Jericho, etc. I usually get to the end of a day and can't remember my name let alone what we saw.

It isn't what you think though, touring around Biblical sites. It's been pretty hard, actually. I mean in a spiritual/emotional way. Because you come to a place like Jerusalem expecting to just have your mind blown by standing where Christ stood, by walking up the hill he walked to die for the redemption of everything ever created. But the reality is, there is no hill. Calvary is just another site, another building thrown up as a holy place and filled with trinkets and people kissing everything. You go to Bethlehem, and instead of a quaint country town where the Messiah was born in a manger, it's a Palestinian outpost, a concrete jungle surrounded by razor wire and armed guards, where impoverished children beg for a living. And I'm supposed to learn about the good Samaritan, looking out over the wilderness on the road to Jericho, but I can't quite hear the lesson over the jabber of the little Bedouin boy who wants my apple, wants to sell me a bracelet, wants my pen to play with. Who, then, is your neighbor...

This is what I've come to: I have no sense of place. For me, a place is a who, not a where. It is the people in a place that make it such. And so I find it hard to see the place of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, when it is Josef the Syrian bellhop who wishes me good morning every time I leave the hotel, or Jonathon the Palestinian bartender who I visit a few nights a week to watch soccer. I have no deep or profound thoughts as to why, it just is; I cannot reach the place of meditation when I can't get passed a place of dirt and smoke and refuse.

But maybe it isn't that different a place then, after all. This is the Jerusalem of Christ.