the unlikely orange

we have finished our third day in the holy land. Shannon and i are both absolutely spent from a very full day, but i wanted to take a moment and let you know what we’ve been up to today on this side of the world (i still can’t get used to the fact that i live most of my tuesday before most of you even really get started with your tuesday…weird). anyway, we started off the today on the mount of olives, and walked the traditional route for the palm sunday procession. the first thing i would tell you about this is that it is a steep downhill walk! Shannon and i joked that it never looks like this in the children’s sunday school material. we stopped part of the way down to remember how Jesus looked over the city of Jerusalem and wept for it. i got a picture there looking west over Jerusalem with my terrible towel, just to represent steeler nation in the holy land. we finished the walk down the mount of olives to the bottom where the garden of gethesem...

Shalom from the holy land. As I sit down to write this, it is late here, Monday night. I’m pretty tired from a FULL day of learning and seeing. Just as I had hoped, I spent the day looking through windows to the past, windows to my faith, and windows to hope. I don’t want to bore you with every detail, but I will give you at least a thumbnail sketch of what we did today. After breakfast we hopped on our bus and left Jerusalem and entered the west bank. I hate to admit that I didn’t have a very good understanding of what was going on between Israel and Palestine, and the very real and day-to-day problems that this tension presents to the people here. The first place we went in the west bank was the shepherds’ fields, the traditional site for the place where the shepherds were watching their flocks when the angels appeared to them to tell them of the birth of Jesus. We got to see the terrain, get a sense of the incredibly difficult work of shepherding, and even go into a cave that would ...

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-ev...

i am a pilgrim.  that statement is true for me in many ways, of course, but never quite so literally as today.  today i am not just on the journey of life or faith, but i am much more specifically on a journey towards jerusalem.  i will drive to an airport, get on a huge jet and fly to london.  there i get on a different plane and we fly to tel aviv.  then we get on a bus and ride to the ancient city where we will be staying for the week.  it's a far cry from walking or riding a colt, but it's still a pilgrimage, albeit a modern one.  as i have prepared for and grown in excitement about this trip to the holy land, i have been drawn to the psalms of ascent in the hebrew bible.  psalms 120-134 are called the 'psalms of degrees' or the 'psalms of ascent.'  scholars disagree a bit about why these are called psalms of ascent, but there is agreement that they were songs that would have been song on the approach to jerusalem, and more specificall...

the week of celebration is finally over.  he's had a dinosaur party, dinosaur cupcakes for school, and then another party last night with shannon's parents!  here are the cupcakes shannon made for his preschool class:  (isn't she talented?) i just want to give a shout out to Greg C. who was the only one to give me any musical suggestions for our trip to israel.  have a better than awesome friday.  check back in tommorow for a post about the beginning of a pilgrimage to jerusalem. 

its been quite the week, between getting ready to leave the country for israel, taking care of jack (who has the croup), missing a bunch of sleep, and trying to do the normal stuff of the week, i've kind of gotten lost in the shuffle.  when i stumbled out of bed this morning and walked, trance-like, down the hall towards the vicinity of the coffeepot, i was stopped in my tracks by the sun shining through the front window, illuminating an appropriate symbol of my life: that's caedmon's hand.  its there from the times that he and jack climb onto the couch (in various stages of undress) and wave goodbye to me when i am leaving for work.  its an oily mess, from one perspective.  but with the sun shining through it, lighting up my groggy morning, it looked like something altogether different.  it looked more like a reminder of what's really important: my family, through which  i am beyond blessed.  what's your symbol?  do you have a marker o...

welcome to another random post today.  or, as it is more honestly called: the-i-don't-have-time-to-really-think-about-what-i-want-to-write-so-this-is-what-you-get post.  -first of all, the big news in our house is that jackson has the croup .  (why do we have to say "the" croup?  [okay, nevermind, a quick google search showed me that we don't have to say "the" croup.  apparently that's just us.  weird]).  so he's been up quite a bit the last two nights with the coughing and wheezing and whatnot.  i've been warning him about his pack-a-day habit, but it's tough.  seriously, though, the poor guy has had a couple of rough nights.  hard to watch kids being sick.  i think he's through the hardest part of it now, though. -one of the best part of january?  leftover candy canes from christmas.  awesome.  -i watched a really cool movie last week that's been sitting on my shelf for awhile: blood diamond.   it was on...