Israel: The Old City of Jerusalem

The journey with YWAM is nearly complete. We are now in Jerusalem for 10 days of debrief, touring the sites, and hanging out with one another. Over the past few days we have all had the chance to visit many of the historic and important sites of this city and of the area around the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. Our time here has been amazing - it is an amazing place!

It's difficult to summarize things in words at this point in time. I won't try. Right now we (and I) are trying to make the most of our opportunity to visit this place. The Old City of Jerusalem is lovely, captivating, and completely confusing. Do travel here sometime if ever you have a chance. I would further recommend staying within the Old City as it adds much more to the experience.

Following our travel from Nepal and arrival in Cairo both Trevor and I became patients in hospitals within Cairo for a number of days. At this point we are both doing much better and returning to health. The hospital and sick adventures in Cairo were the focal point of our group's time there as Trevor and I relied heavily upon the grace and mercy of the Lord and others. Let's just say that the hospital experience in Cairo brought two extremes - the absolute worst even requiring jail-break like actions, and the absolute best of a highly rated facilities. Such extremes also brought about due stresses amongst the team members who were trying their absolute best in a situation that is very undesirable. Their a team of hero's.

So, the week in Cairo with all of the varied extremes really tainted the view of Egypt that I left with, and the same is true for some of the team. We found ourselves crossing the border at Tabas into Israel and plopped down in a nice hostel near the beach of the Red Sea in Eilat, Israel. These few days were set aside for our team debrief and a bit of a holiday - most welcome after Cairo. The staggering aspect of arriving in Eilat was the fact that it is nearly a completely Western place - something we had not been around for some months. And, so, there was even a bit of culture shock entering a place and a culture that is rather close to that which we come from.

The bus from Eilat to Jerusalem provided a welcome view of Israel and the area around the Dead Sea. It was a trip made on my 29th birthday - scary to think that 30 is so close... We arrived in Jerusalem and began anxiously awaiting the remaining three teams which we had not yet had contact with (out of five other teams). It was a good day.

It is now a week that we have been in the Old City. Such is hard to believe. We will complete our school with a graduation on Thursday, and Friday, we will all begin making our way in many different directions. I will stay until next Sunday and depart Tel Aviv for Barcelona.

I am not going to summarize the last 6 months into a short paragraph - in fact, I cannot. Words are not adequate in any length, nor can the real experiences ever fully be captured with simply just words. It's life changing.

Thanks for your interest, thoughts, prayers, emails, and any other support. God is much bigger than I thought and He is so much more than you may imagine. He will change you and your life if you wish, but it's your decision, your choice, your life. It will be lived and it will end. How do you want to live it? How do you want to end it?

P.S. The photos have finally been uploaded. Right now there are around 95 photos from the Outreach months. As I said in my last post many are nothing that capture the ministry, but more the sights and people of the team. You'll have to ask to see others that I will hopefully collect from my team in the next few days...