Friday, February 15, 2008

Finally Ready...

I am finally ready to write about my two week experience in the Holy Land. I know that I will not be able to convey everything or how much this experience has changed my life. Even through pictures I know I will not be successful in sharing this experience. Each person that I have talked to thus far since returning expects from me some version of a romanticized Christian epiphany. How did going to the holy places make you feel, I am often asked. Whenever I am asked this my first instinct is to make something spectacular up, some religious experience, but in the end I tell the awful truth; I did not have a profound religious experience, not in the sense most people are expecting. No, rather, my religious experience was in meeting the people, hearing their stories, and understanding finally why God chose to show himself to the world in that place, what we now call the Holy Land.

Since the beginning of human civilizations, the Holy Land has been a place of unrest, wars, defeat, and being conquered. The people there have suffered and suffered and yet I have never met anyone in the USA that has as much hope and resolve as the Christian Palestinians I had the pleasure of meeting on this trip. I learned so much more about the world, human behavior, resilience, and oppression than I would ever have thought I would, and I am grateful for it.

I spent much of my time quietly contemplating what I saw everyday, what I heard, what I felt; maybe too much time. I say that because since I have been back, I feel as though there is something missing, something just out of my reach. What it is I do not know right now. I fell in love with that area of the world and I left a piece of myself behind. I fell in love with the people I met, the work the Lutheran Church is doing over there to provide outlets of hope to the Palestinian peoples as a whole; not just Christians but Muslims as well. I know I have a role now to participate in this work, whether by returning to the Holy Land, or by working in the states on resolutions for peace.

And I know that God chose to show himself to the world in Palestine because it is through Christ and Christ's suffering that we are saved, the cross. It is in Palestine that God chose to come to us because of his love for us, we suffer and here God suffered too.

So for me, there was no romantic epiphany, there was really no sense of awe when visiting our holy places. Only a fuller understanding of the human condition and the resilience of the human race, fighting for dignity, fighting for hope, fighting for peace.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

I promise...

I haven't written on my blog for a long time. I was out of the country from Jan. 14-29 on an amazing cross-cultural trip to the Holy Land. I promise, as soon as I have more time I'll write about it and share pictures. I have posted several albums on my facebook page already with captions for each picture, but I have not written about the experience as of late. I don't want to do that until I truly have the time to sit down and really expunge on the things I saw, heard, and felt while visiting the Holy Land and meeting its people. So for now I will have to leave you with only this: more will be coming in the near future.