I sit tonight in a hotel room somewhere in Jerusalem on a sunday night. It’s a far cry from the brown stucco huts and clay-colored buildings of the Jerusalem of from my children’s bible imagination. This is a city, of course. And I sit here with my laptop, a window into the world of search engines and answers to every conceivable question. Just beyond the words I type, above them, is a flat screen plasma television, a window into what entertains this part of the world: shows about football (soccer), gaudy looking talk shows, and scantily-clad dance competitions.
But I am not here to look through those windows. I have ascended in a plane (two of them, actually), to this city, with the full intention of looking through a window into the past, to search for the One who asked unanswerable questions. And so I go to sleep tonight in a modern city, full of all the sights and sounds of a modern world, with a heart set not on answers, but on what is ancient.
Our trip here was rather non-eventful, which is the kind of word you want to use to describe any trip involving flight at incredible speeds miles above the surface of the earth. We all arrived safe and sound in London, and then again in Tel Aviv, and then took the 45-minute bus ride across the country to Jerusalem. We’ve had dinner and are all looking at the prospect of trying to tell our bodies that everything’s normal and we’ll just go to sleep tonight like it was any other night, even though we’ve just traveled halfway around the globe against the current of time. We’re hoping to sleep anyway, and to sleep heavily.
I will try to post as often as I can, but access to the internet here is unfortunately not free, and rather expensive, so we’ll see what happens. Shalom!
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