Idle and Blessed

A big shout out to Shai, our bus driver, who installed wifi on the bus. I'll be blogging from here instead of paying at the hotel. Yay! Although our itinerary has already changed so much (which means they didn't even bother giving us a copy...aka, nightmare for type A's like me...) we have managed to see everything on the books for Day 1: Sea of Galilee, the Jesus Boat, Korazim, Capernaum, Kursi, and the Church of Peter's Primacy. We started out the morning with breakfast and a quiet solo devotional time on the beautiful shore of the Sea of Galilee, then walked down for a boat ride across the Sea. I cannot even begin to relate everything I have already experienced and seen and learned and prayed. Pastor E is one of my current favorite people -- he teaches at each site, and already I have been convicted, enlightened, and gently pointed toward the God-Man. At the Mount of the Beatitudes, he let me read Matthew 5 to the group from my Greek New Testament as he read the Engl...

I'm glad traveling to faraway places requires actually watching the ground move under you. I thanked God for the sight of Nashville fading below me as we left for Philadelphia, because it helped me understand I'm really leaving, I'm really going to the Holy Land, I'm really going to leave life behind for two weeks. I love flying, partly because being on a plane always means journey . Being on a plane, for me, has always meant an adventure with God. Russia. Planes have always meant Russia. Israel is not like Russia though, and leaving in the middle of the semester adds a whole host of different complications. So I don't have an idea of what to expect for the next two weeks of my life. But I feel so honored that God would choose to pluck me out of a busy semester and set me down in the land in which He chose to reveal Himself. He's teaching me by putting a pause on the life I sometimes allow to consume me, asking for my full attention and trust, and then gently sp...