Israel 2008

Here is a slideshow of our Israel trip. To read the captions, scroll your curser over the picture. You can speed up or slow down the speed of the slideshow with the +- signs in the bottom lefthand corner of the slideshow.

We had the awesome priviledge to go on a 12 day tour of Israel. Wow, this is a tough trip to summarize. There is much to say! It was without a doubt, one of the most life-changing trips we have ever or will ever go on. Cameron and I both agree that we will never be able to read the Bible in the same way that we did before. Our eyes were opened to many geographical sites throughout Israel where much of the stories in the Bible took place. It was amazing to walk and learn where Jesus would have walked and taught his disciples. Our guide, George was faithful to remind us to always ask "Why do we need to know that?" about each detail that God has written in His Word. We made connections that we had never seen before in the Bible. Learning Hebrew words was very helpful to create accurate pictures of Biblical imagery. Our guide asked us to say the Shema in Hebrew and English every morning with him while we were on a site having a very applicable devotion. It is "Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord alone! Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself." Duet. 6:4/ Mark 12:29

Taken from an email Cam wrote to our family the day we got back: We constantly laughed at all the "high-heeled" tours we would see in places. We got some odd looks from those groups as we would show up dusty, sweaty, and decked out in hiking boots and laden with water bottles. The other tours would pull up to the parking lots located at the top of the mountain where the Biblical sites are - and don't be deceived, every Biblical site is on top of a mountain somewhere. We, however, would hike up the mountain, stopping occasionally for a lesson from our Rabbi. He was big on "learning with our feet' and although some were skeptical at first we all agreed it was a great way the learn. Mount of Olives, Mount Carmel, Mount Arbel, Qumran, Masada, the desert, not only did we get to see the places, we got to understand what it was like to get to those places in the Biblical time period. We also got to walk for two hours from Chorazin to Capernaum one afternoon, learning along the way, must in the same way Jesus and His disciples would have done. That walk was through "Wadi Thistle" which was a former creekbed full of waist-high thorns and thistle. Our schedule was 6 AM wakeup, 6:30 breakfast, 7:00 on the bus. We would usually get back to the hotel or kibbutz ant 8:00 PM for an 8:30 dinner. We walked 10-12 miles some days, other days were lighter, but I would say we averaged 6 miles per day for 12 days. We did twice as much stuff as any other tour we saw. Probably the hardest day we had was our wilderness experience day. There is a crater (Makhtesh) in southern Israel where many archaeologists and our guide are pretty convinced the children of Israel wandered for most of their 40 years after the exodus. We hiked 1000 feet to the bottom of this crater and then hiked along a creek bed for many miles. It was supposedly 103 degrees that day and our guide got a little "off course." We ended up hiking probably 7 miles in that heat, one of our group got pretty overheated and many got blistered pretty bad. We still had a few more sites to see later that afternoon as well. I now know why the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt.

One of my favorite things we got to do was chase sheep! One day we were driving through the Judean wilderness (known as midbar = wilderness you can survive in) looking for herds of sheep and goats. We stopped to look at two different heards of sheep and goats. The second stop we hiked a little ways and sat on the edge of a small cliff and watched the sheep and goats. We silently observed for about 20 minutes and then discussed our observations. We made connections to many verses in the Bible about sheep and goats. We learned that sheep walked in straight lines along narrow paths on steep mountains called "paths of righteousness." The shepherd leads the sheep along the right path. The shepard also watches his sheep graze from a high place. He learns each sheep by name and the sheep know the shepard's voice. Throughout much of our trip we were just like the sheep...hiking in a single file line, looking at the ground in front of us to see where to step next. We trusted our shepard, George, to guide us and care for us. I wept as I thought of how the Lord, my shepard, has seen me crying on a rock alone and has carried me through trials and shown me the way to go in my life. There were many powerful lessons as we learned about sheep and shepards throughout the trip.

The hardest part of the trip was to leave Carter and Mason, but they did a great job. 4 of our close friends - the Pereas, Voskamps, Shumans, and Jantz' graciously kept the boys for us. Thanks a million everyone! We are indebted to you for the awesome job you did caring for our boys. Cam and I think it was a lot harder on us than it was on the boys. We believe that the boys will be impacted for years to come as we will teach them accurate pictures of the stories in the Bible.

If you are interested in this tour, you can check out the tours website at www.gtitours.com and the teaching material at www.followtherabbi.com