Entries from November 2005 ↓

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Me with a grinding bowl                                      my Egypt group

The Wayfarer has been silent for the past several weeks, wandering through the hill country of Judah. But with a conviction on the lack of updates, he pauses to inform those interested in his condition on his recent whereabouts.

General Thoughts
It seems as if I am a marble on the ever-increasing slope of the semester. The weeks go by so fast and all of the events that I remember looking at on the calendar at the beginning of the semester are cruising by and will soon all be over. The Land & Bible class is over already. This class was the one in which we went on field trips and visited the sites that we were learning about. It was sad when we had to pull into the moshav from our last field trip. There are other field trips with other classes, but no more to biblical sites with the whole class.

Egypt
This Friday, I will be leaving to go to Egypt for travel study break. I am very excited to travel and see some great historical sites. I am in a group with three others: Shane, Megan, and Erin. We have hung out a lot this semester, so it seemed natural that we would spend a week in Egypt together. We are leaving at midnight on Friday night and returning 8 days later on Sunday afternoon. We have a lot of plans for doing some fun stuff like going to the Giza pyramids, the Cairo Museum, Luxor, and Aswan. We also have some fun stuff on the list, such as going to the roof of every hotel we stay at, for the view, buying man dresses, doing a scavenger hunt with the other Egypt groups, and working at McDonald’s for an hour in order to get a free ice cream cone. Please pray that Christ would be on our minds in a very God-less culture. The situation in Egypt is different from Israel. It is all Arab and they hate both Americans and Israelis. Pray that if it is the Lord’s will, that we would be safe and enjoy Him as we enjoy another corner of Creation. Pray also that our group would live righteously to one another, seeking to make much of Christ and not ourselves.

From the Heart
Well, I haven’t completely updated ya’ll on Galilee and haven’t even started to tell you about our four day Negev trip. I can tell you about the places we went some other time, but now I am going to give you an update on what God has done in my heart over the past month.

Even though my time in Galilee was spent trying to grasp the weight of Jesus’ ministry upon the very shores that I was staying at and reading the Gospels in a different light, I left the place feeling empty. I felt as if I was supposed to be changed in a radical way, like I was to be completely different with new life goals and an amazing zeal for the Lord. Although I do believe that God used that experience for His glory in my life, I think I was expecting the wrong kind of change. What I was looking for was a change in outward actions, but what God wanted was a change of the heart. I was left in this quandary, confused about what I was to do in response to all that I learned in Galilee.

I have been going through Jeremiah while I have been here and during that time after Galilee, I was meditating on what it means to forsake the Lord. Jeremiah confronts the nation of Israel on how they had committed two evils: they forsook the Lord their God and replaced Him with their own idolatrous God. He says that the fear of God is not in them. I began to question what evidences were in my own life that show that I fear the great God of Ages. Do I live out the theology that I so readily can quote and debate about? I have been learning about the how the Jewish people have a specific emphasis on action, rather than doctrine. Although I don’t think that my focus on doctrine should decrease, but rather that I should place more weight than I have been on applying that doctrine. For example:

• Is it evident that I believe in the depravity of man by how I interact with unbelievers?
• Does my life show that I fear God and not man?
• Can others see that my heart belongs to Christ Jesus and that my affections for Him are abounding more and more?

During the Negev trip, we had a time in the wilderness, where we went off on our own and communed with our God. We talked with the same God who had brought His people across the very ground we were sitting on. Here is an excerpt of my journal from that day:

“For me, this time was very special and helped me to see my heart in another light. I read my favorite psalm, number 63, and it was very different to read it in the wilderness that it speaks of. The Lord revealed that my affections were weak. I don’t love Him with a love that burns within me. I am not desperately thirsty for Him. I cannot say with David that “my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you; as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” My problem is not that I love the things of this world too much, but rather I don’t love my Lord and Savior enough.”

I hope that sharing some of this with you has given you a small window into
the spiritual side of my semester here in the land of Israel. I know that
the Lord has great things in store for me yet; I don’t know if I won’t
realize what they are until I get back, or if He will reveal them to me now.
Our God is great. He has carried His faithful ones throughout history and He
will continue to sustain us today – He is the All-Sovereign Holy One.