Though several months have passed since our winter trips, perhaps it is not too late to report that these experiences went very well.  Ample time in the desert and the well-watered lands of the north, good contacts with the various peoples of Israel, and of course walking the world of the Bible left everyone with much more than they had bargained for.  Traveller Bob Shuey’s comment will stick with me forever:  “I thought I was going on a vacation; I had no idea …  I couldn’t have anticipated what this actually was nor the profound impact [the trip] would have on me.”  Bob’s comment is typical of first-timers on our trips.  It is difficult to imagine from the CNN images of the middle east (or from homemade slides, for that matter!) the depth of this penetrating experience on one’s knowledge of the world and the Bible and one’s walk with God.  I’m at a loss to describe completely all of the factors that set our trips apart.  But a couple things do stand out that over the years have seemed to have had the greatest impact on our travellers:

1. THE TRIP IS NOT A TOUR OR A COURSE.  These alternatives pretty well describe what is typically done in the land of Israel by agents in the west or in country.  Tours depend on local guides who are trained well but sometimes don’t connect with what travellers are looking for academically and spiritually.  Tours also spend a great amount of time in buses and in tourist shops.  Courses, on the other hand, are generally run by western agents in Israel focusing largely on technical matters of geology and geography, most of which are presented in a classroom setting.  What we do is richly informational, deeply inspirational, and refreshingly recreational.  We spend no time in traditional tourist shops or in classrooms covering things that could just as easily be covered in classrooms in America.  Every bit of our time in Israel is given to presenting you with an authentic experience of the Bible from within its historical, cultural and geographical context.  Far from wearing out our travellers, everyone comes home invigorated by hands-on experiences of being in one of the most important countries of the world today and in ancient times.

2. THE TRIP IS RUN ACCORDING TO A BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY.  One of the things that most of our participants comment on as providing significant impact is the way we set up our journeys according the flow of the Scriptures.  We have spent a great deal of time over the years crafting our itinerary to cover “first things first and final things last.”  We begin in the world of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel; then move to the world of the exodus and the desert wanderings of the early Hebrews.  Next on the itinerary we experience the context of the kings and the prophets of national Israel.  Transitioning with the exile, we move on finally to the New Testament, focusing, of course, on the life of Jesus.  We look at the seven phases in the life of our Lord sticking closely to the flow in which these phases unfolded.  They are:
a.  Anticipation.  Sites connected with promises in the Hebrew Bible of the coming Messiah.
b.  Birth and Boyhood.  Sites in Galilee (Nazareth) and Judea (Jerusalem and Bethlehem).
c.  Commencement.  Sites connected with the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry.
d.  Distinction.  Sites in Galilee connected with the preaching and healing ministry of Jesus.
e.  Exiting.  Sites in Upper Galilee and the Golan connected with Jesus’ withdrawal from the crowds.
f.  Finalizing.  Sites in the Jordan Valley connected with Jesus’ drawing together of his ministry.
g.  Gloom and Glory.  Sites in Jerusalem connected intimately with the final week of Jesus on earth.
These are a couple of the things that stand out in mind.  I hope this has been helpful for you and that very soon you’ll be able to join us on one of our excursions into the biblical world.  Like Bob Shuey and many others, you will come back changed.  That I promise.

Hey Friends!  At this time of year I often find myself in the middle east—usually in body but always in heart.  My wife is fond of calling these places “[my] other life.”  The other day I ran across this little piece I wrote awhile back.  It captures the grip that the lands of the Bible have held me in for some time.  I called it:  “As If It Were Yesterday.”  And I thought it might interest you as we approach the season of our Savior’s birth.

I remember it today as if it were yesterday.  I’d been in Israel little more than a  week.  And I found myself in Galilee sitting on a hillside that once was a center of regional government during the time of Jesus.  Then very little of the city of Sepphoris had been unearthed, so few imagined how significantly this site would change notions about the early life of Jesus and the social landscape of the New Testament.  Growing up in Nazareth only 5 miles away, Jesus was surely aware of this highly developed city with a bustling business, intellectual and social life.  Perhaps he even worked there as an apprentice craftsman while the city underwent renovation during the days of Herod Antipas.  All of this was far from my mind in the autumn of 1973 as I sat perched atop two millennia of dust settled upon the ruins of Jesus’ world.  But I did know even then that this land would forever have a profound influence on my life as I had begun to experience a closeness with my Lord and with the biblical people that I had not known before.  One Old City shopkeeper puts it well, “You come to the land once; it gets a mortgage on your soul, and you have to return.”  And I have been returning now for more than a quarter of a century.

While much has changed in the lands of the Bible since the days of Jesus and the prophets, much hasn’t.  You can still see shepherds watching their flocks by night, desert dwellers living the life of Abraham and Sarah, fishermen casting their nets in the Sea of Galilee, valleys of shadows of death, baptismal sites in the Jordan river, and yes, even political tension with neighboring peoples.  Time always stands still for me when I walk through the old walled city of Jerusalem and occasionally tread on stones that have survived many changes since the days of Herod.  These are stones that perhaps felt the weight of the Master as He walked through the city that made Him weep.

But in the end I’ve discovered that it is more than the stones and the places they support that draw me back so frequently.  It’s the people themselves.  People who live everyday with a connectedness to the biblical peoples because they are part of the same physical and cultural environment.  And this environment which limits access to many of the things we take for granted challenges them daily to live a more authentic life than we often know on this side of the globe.  I’ve discovered that more than a third of what is recorded in Scripture of the words of Jesus warned His followers of the traps of living in a predictable, manageable world that can obviate faith.  When God mapped out a geography for His kingdom, He chose a strip of land only 150 miles long and 50 miles wide without a significant permanent water source.  This is the sort of stuff that makes dependence upon Him a reality and not just the rhetoric of religion.  This is what keeps drawing me back:  a revitalizing experience of faith in the God who controls every facet of my being.  And that is what is always there for me in the land and in its peoples as if it were yesterday.