Wednesday in Israel

Shalom! We are the Tel Aviv airport for the second times in two days. We arrived yesterday on an El Al flight from Rome and stayed the night at a hotel near the airport. Our flight was high adventure as we went through four layers of security starting with a thorough check of our luggage at the Rome Airport. The first security person was an Israeli Army Reservist who frequently spends his reserve time in Las Vegas at Nellis training military personnel from all over the world. He was a nice guy with a relentless security wand that probed every inch of our luggage. That was only "round one." It is great fun to see the variety of families arriving at the airport...the ultra-orthodox families arriving from NewYork and other places with MANY children in tow, etc. We took a few pictures of a bomb-sniffing dog walking forward through the luggage from our flight as it circled around in the luggage carousel. For their safety, we weren't allowed to take pictures of the soldiers. There are many of them! The woman who sat next to us on the flight told us about the two to three years of volunteer service required of all young women and men after high school. Later that day, we saw some of them on break....the Israeli men were all eating McDonald's hamburgers with huge piles of fries and the women were eating pizza and Japanese food. We were enjoying Israeli food....chicken, couscous, cucumbers, tomatoes, and hummas. The Israeli woman who sat next to me  (Pr. M.) on the flight and I had a wonderful conversation! Our first-born children are the same age. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor who was transferred around Europe for three years during the time she was thirteen to sixteen years old along with about 100 Jewish girls. They were from a variety of European nations and were protected by a careful cadre of people who wanted to make sure they survived the war. When the war ended, her mother discovered that none of the other members of her family had survived. She said that her mother was "a shadow of a person for the rest of her life." Such evil..what we as humans do to one another.

We returned to the airport today to meet the rest of our tour group...English-speaking tourists  arriving from a variety of departure points. Many of them will likely feel like we did a week ago! This is the part of the trip for which we are the most excited! For us, it is more than a trip. It is a pilgrimage into the roots of our faith. For pastors, we can't begin to find the words to describe the depth of joy and privilege we feel to finally be in the places that have been the source of our preaching, teaching, and faith for years. It feels like a journey into our very souls!