Waiting

    I. Cannot. Stand it. Two weeks to go and I am losing it. I am too excited to think straight. Not to mention, with Scotty winning and New Directions losing my TV distractions are gone. To combat my pre-trip psychosis I will enlighten you all on some of the details of where our group will be travelling and what we will be up to. Here is the itenerary as far as I know about:
    Tuesday, June 7: 2 Wayland vans will leave the Lubbock/Plainview area for Dallas. Students from several other campuses will be joining us the following day at the airport. Wayland fun fact: there are campuses in Amarillo, Lubbock, San Antonio, and Wichita Falls, Texas; Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska: Sierra Vista and Phoenix, Arizona; Aiea, Hawaii; Albuquerque and Clovis, New Mexico; Altus, Oklahoma; and Kenya, Africa. Yay Pioneers!
     Wednesday: Listen for a bell 'cuz I'm gettin' wings! First flight ever from Dallas to New York City. That will be a test run for the whopper 12 hour flight to London.
     Thursday (I think? Israel is 8 hours ahead of us): Arrive in Tel Aviv, Israel. This is exhausting already! Wikipedia tells me that it will be about 75 degrees. Lovely if you ignore the 70%  humidity, ouch!
     Friday: Walking tour of Tel Aviv. Visiting Knight's Hall, the Baha'i Shrine, Haifa Port, and Elijah's Cave. I'm sure I could make up some exciting descriptions of these places, but Junior Asparagus taught me the importance of not telling fibs. Do any of you know what these are?
     Saturday: Hangin' in Jesus's hood with an excursion to Nazareth. Church of the Annunciation, Mary's Well, Mount of Beatitudes. Clueless about these as well, but I can tell you that Annunciation is a bearded person's way of saying "MTV called, Mary's 16 and Pregnant."
      Saturday: My favorite. We'll be in the Jordan Valley. We will see the Dead Sea Scroll caves, float in the dead sea, and spend the night in a bedouin camp. Check it. http://www.hanokdim.com/ What's a bedouin? Desert shepherds. Aside from sheep, they know all about cute little donkeys and another great creature. What starts with a C and ends with an amel??? I suddenly feel the need to sing a little Arabian niiiiiiiiights and Arabian daaaaaaaaaaayyysss!!
       Ahem..Sunday..right. On Sunday, We head to Jerusalem. Trading in my pew for the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane.
       Monday: Bethlehem! Hopefully Dad will skip over this sentence, but I'm pretty interested by what I heard about Bethlehem. We'll take an armored bus! Livin' on the edge. But not very edgy, Dad. Actually, we'll be riding on a cotton candy cloud pulled by unicorns. Yup. Then some free time back in Jerusalem.
       Tuesday: Walking tour of the Old City of Jerusalem. I'm very interested in what kinds of people we will see. I'm also curious about whether my fellow female travellers and I will be excluded from certain sites. I'll let ya know.
       Wednesday: Round 2 of airports, snacks, flights, naps, snacks, flights, airports, snacks, naps...well, you get it.  Recover from jet lag (I hear that takes a day for every hour you skipped, wowzer). Upload pictures. Try not to die of awesome.
     
   

Archaeology in Israel: Ya Dig?

            17 Days from now I will be on my first flight. Altogether I am counting about 23 hours in the air before reaching Tel Aviv. You can bet that this traveler will have plenty of motion sickness remedies in her zebra-print backpack.

As I prepare to visit so many historical places, I’d like to take this opportunity to organize my thoughts and to get on the same page as my readers. Dr. Shaw shared with us an article from National Geographic’s December 2010 edition that I would encourage you all to take a look at.             http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/12/david-and-solomon/draper-text/2

The article talks about the controversy surrounding archaeology in the Holy Land.  Jewish Israelis hold fast to the Old Testament accounts of King David and their national identity as God’s chosen people. With this in mind, archaeology becomes less about objective discovery and more about proving the Bible. On the other hand, Palestinians are resentful about Israeli claims on territory they have lived in for generations. Some scholars feel that biblical accounts should not be taken literally and criticize efforts to prove the bible as attempts to validate Israel’s existence.

In short, either King David is real and Israel is right, or the Old Testament is a fish story and the Palestinians are. Of course there are many other important details, but this is the problem I want to focus on.

As a Bible-believing Christian, I feel first drawn to the first argument. I believe that King David was who the Bible said he was. I believe that the places and people talked about in the Old Testament were real and tangible. At the same time, I think that any reasonable person recognizes that in most arguments there is a little bit of right and a little bit of wrong on both sides. I believe that God wants my heart, my soul, and my brain. It is so important to read the Bible within a cultural context. We have to recognize that the way we understand the writing of history may be different from the ancient Hebrew understanding.

I feel like I gained a tiny understanding of this when I named this blog. Being a little bit familiar with Spanish, it was my understanding that language was like a coin. On one side you have English, and on the other you have whatever it is you want to translate to.  “Dog” flips over into “Perro” and easily flips back, unless of course you share my utter inability to rrrroll my rrrr's . I failed to think about the fact that Spanish and English are both Latin-based languages, they’re in the same family. Hebrew is from another part of the world, totally unrelated to what I know language to be like. This turns my coin idea into a rubix cube. “Adventure” didn’t go straight into “Harpatka’ah”, it went to Hebrew letters. Then there were different types of “adventure”, different parts of speech, different spellings. After some persistent Googling, I still don’t know if I got it right. Is it not reasonable to think about the Old Testament this way? That maybe we have to leave a little room? That maybe we aren’t going to find hard evidence of everything we read? Maybe we don’t know everything?

I think that the prospect of seeing biblical sites is very exciting. However, I find the use of archaeology to prove the bible a little manipulative. I don’t need to prove the greatness of Israel to believe in the greatness of my God. He picked that scrawny country on purpose. As far as I’m concerned, we ought to seek truth and justice where it can be found and chill out where it cannot. Maybe if these conflicting scientists could put their emotional attachments to the issue aside, we could really get somewhere.

Having barely expressed what I set out to say, I think I’ve likely reached the end of your attention span. Thanks for staying with me. On a lighter note, I got a fantastic new notebook to write in on the trip. I anticipate this blog getting far more exciting when things get rolling.

Counting Down!

Departure date gets closer and closer, and I grow more and more excited. I once described myself as a young woman who knows where she is going, and that is anywhere I can get a plane ticket. That remains to be proven as I have yet to fly anywhere, much less transatlantic. Even so, I anxiously await the opportunity to take my first baby step in seeing the world: Israel.

            Details are important, so here’s the scoop. I am leaving June 8 for a 9 day study tour of Israel with Wayland Baptist University’s religion department. Since Israel could easily fit inside the Texas panhandle, we will be able to visit just about everything. While I don’t have a great deal of information about what we will be doing and seeing, I can say that I am very excited about riding a camel.

            Most people get all in a tizzy about “walking where Jesus walked”. I know that this is a meaningful experience for many people and I mean no disrespect. At the same time, I am having a hard time with this mindset. My Jesus lives in me and his Holy Spirit walks around with me right here in Texas. If that doesn’t blow your mind, then I don’t know what will. I am thrilled about having new experiences and gaining new understanding on people and places outside my day-to-day. I consider it a terrific opportunity to get a living, breathing context to put my bible knowledge in.  But I am not going to Israel to meet Jesus. He came to meet me.

            I’ve said it before, and I will say it many more times, if you helped me out with my funding by buying a pumpkin roll, coming to a fundraiser, or some other form THANK YOU! I am so grateful to go on this trip. I can hardly wrap my mind around the fact that it is ME and not some friend of mine flying to Israel in 24 DAYS!! I hope that you’ll enjoy reading what I have to say about it. I hope to be updating this blog while we are gone with informative, exciting, and (you know me) sometimes goofy insights.