Israel and Jerusalem Travels...

OK... I can delay no longer. One reason I've been hesitant to post on this is because it's hard to know where to start. I'll do some bullets and fill in the blanks with a story or two.

The excitement:

1) I highly recommend when you're flying to Israel, that you get to the plane VERY early. I'm a million mile traveler and for the first time ever, I missed a flight. I was at the airport 90 minutes early and it wasn't enough. Instead of a flight that arrived at 6pm to Tel Aviv... I took the red-eye that arrived at 5:30am. Made for a long day, but it was ok. I can sleep anywhere!

2) On the cab ride from the airport to my meeting, I had left my laptop bag and camera in the trunk. (mistake). We are on the freeway to Tel Aviv and we pass a minivan (if you can call it that) with a big open trailer with a camel riding in it. It was unreal. Sorry... no pic.

3) Our meeting was in Haifa (yeah, that's where the enemies of Israel were landing rockets 2 years ago from Lebanon!). On the way... we stopped and had coffee in Cesarea. (!!) The IBM lab where we were meeting the customer and the research staff was on Mt. Carmel. They don't know exactly where Elijah called down the fire for the alter, but it was somewhere on the mountain. Haifa looks out over the Mediterranean and it's a BEAUTIFUL city. It was very smoggy the day we were there so none of my pics gave an accurate view of the place. Still, to be near where Elijah demonstrated a small fraction of God's power was very special.

4) Customer meetings ended in Tel Aviv at about 8:30pm... so I crashed in my hotel and slept, slept, slept. I did kick on the TV and enjoyed essentially American TV. Israel is surprisingly western. I had Fox, CBS, CNN, ABC, all with Hebrew subtitles. Strange!

5) The next day was all business meetings in our Tel Aviv office. I had an hour-long presentation on my product and LOVED giving the pitch. Good customer meetings after too. Very productive time.

My business day was wrapping up about 5:30pm, so I called the concierge at my hotel and a colleague and I arranged a trip to go to Jerusalem from 7pm till midnight. It was $200 each and WORTH EVERY DIME.

Our guide (Eli) was a French Jew. He's lived here for most of his adult life and he had some interesting perspective on things. Very interesting. I got a good history of 1948 and 1967 wars that I believed was accurate. His opinion of who was responsible for killing Jesus was not so credible. His view is that when the crowd was calling for someone to be released they were saying Bar-Abbas, which in Hebrew means son of the father. He believes the Romans didn't understand what was meant and released a man named Barabbas. Seems like if they cared enough... they would've cleared up the misunderstanding before the allowed him to be killed. Eli's views were creative, to say the least!

We had dinner and then walked a few blocks to the old city of Jerusalem.

There are too many things here to paragraph out. Bullets.

- the city walls were so amazing at night. Many of them have only been unearthed in the last 40 years. It's special to see how many "new discoveries" they are making all the time here. The sense of time is overwhelming.

- the old city is full of muslims! It's the strangest thing, honestly. As many of you know, it's divided into different quarters of Armenians, Jews, Christians and Muslims. All of them living near one another like regular neighbors.

The Via Dolorosa.

It's really hard to write this, but they have commercialized this walk so much, that it takes away from the meaning. It's about 10 feet wide and likely 1/4 of a mile long. It winds back and forth up the hill. It was 9pm when we were there, so the tomb area was closed. Disappointing. I can't say it wasn't still an emotional time. Hard to describe how it felt to be in the place where Jesus walked (generally speaking, I believe) and died. Even with all the shops and the commercialism... it was still a very special place.

One of the neatest things about it was that I was there the Thursday before Good Friday. There were Christians (many carrying candles) walking the path and singing. Some of them were priests dressed up in long robes (their normal attire, I'm told). I'll post the best picture I have of this. Very special to see.

I really don't know how to describe how special and sad it made me feel to be here. It 's a somber place.

(we walked backwards on the path. starting at the tomb and ending at the start of Christ's walk)

So we then came to the steps where Pilot stood and washed his hands of his condemnation.
Then we came to the place where they scourged him. It was very, very strange and sad to be in this place. Very strange to think of God being beaten in the place where you're standing. Strange isn't really the word... but it's how I felt. Numb. Sad. Thankful that he didn't stay in that tomb!

The Wall

After weaving our way on the Via Dolorosa, we made our way through security to the Western Wall of the Temple. The day I was there was a Jewish Holiday called Purim. It's their celebration of Esther's actions that saved Israel from destruction by Haman. There were many, many men dressed up in their traditional outfits and praying at the wall. Tons of slips of papers stuffed into the cracks of the wall. The men praying were rhythmically swaying back and forth as they read and prayed. (Eli said it was because they wanted to stir up the heavens with their prayers like a candle flame stirs the air around it.) This was a very special place. They are continuing to excavate under the temple mound and we went back into a 'newer' section. I was talking with Eli and he and I were both enjoying talking about all the things that had occurred in this place. He was very happy to be there... because this is a holy place for him too. We talked about David bringing the Arc of the Covenant here, Solomon spending 50+ years to have it built, etc. etc. It was AMAZING. Then, Eli reminded me that the temple is in the region of Moriah... and I remembered that the Temple is the place where Abraham brought Isaac to sacrifice him to God. I don't know why it was that fact... but it's what impacted me the most. Abraham. Here. Willing to kill his own son because he trusted God to raise him from the dead. Abraham had faith in God's promise to make his descendants more numerous than the stars, even if he killed his son. I can't describe how real it made everything to me. What faith. I stood alone at the Wall for a long time.

Mount of Olives

Can you believe this? We then left the temple mount and drove to the Mount of Olives. It looks over the city of Jerusalem. It's not far at all. On the way, you drive past a cemetery. Many of the prophets and important biblical figures are buried there. I'd love to walk through the cemetery someday.



We went up on the Mount of Olives and I took some slightly blurry nighttime pictures of Jerusalem. To think that Jesus spent a lot of time here praying was amazing. It was all overwhelming by this point. Amazing.

Hotel/Airport/Madrid

In addition to $200 for the trip... I paid one night's sleep. We arrived back at my hotel at 1:00am and I had to be at the airport at 3:30am to make my 6am flight. (no being late this time!) So, I paid Eli 50euro ($75) to take me to the airport and I hung out there till my flight left for Madrid. Seeing Jerusalem was worth not sleeping for one night.

Thanks for reading the REALLY long post. It's taken me over an hour to write it... and it's now past 11pm. To bed!

Thankfully for this amazing life God has given me,
Jason