Travel Scribblings: Adventures of All Kinds

For the aid of the reader, here’s a list of the new names that appear in this post:

• Elijah, slightly southern brother with a perpetual half-grin
• Vivek, the brother from India, sweet and always up for a good time

...

Like the Dead Sea
Finest words you ever said to me
Honey, can’t you see
I was born to be, be your Dead Sea

Wesley Schultz crooned his song through my earbuds just as the real Dead Sea came into my view for the second time in my life. I felt a little thrill at returning—I wasn’t sure I’d ever come back. Here we were, though, the forty of us piled into the bus again, music turned up and spirits high. This time, we were headed to En Gedi.

The plan had been to visit the oasis during tour, but the rain had spoiled that agenda. Miriam had said she’d try to get us there eventually and she’d succeeded, using our extra lunch money to pay for a bus. I breathed a prayer of relief that we got to experience this site without a half dozen mini-lectures on history. There was a place for that, but there was also a place for pure fun, without the academics.

Bobby Moss and Dr. De Rosset were the perfect pair to take us, too. They understood the balance between fun and academics—Bobby was once a youth pastor and Dr. De Rosset was ever in pursuit of a mesmerizing life. We laughed often with the two of them.

I had determined to live it up on this day. For once, I was prepared with shorts and good hiking shoes, and when we came to the very first waterfall, I was the second girl in. I would have been the first, if not for my woeful hesitation, but Emilene beat me to it, leaning back into the falls and looking for all the world like a mermaid in her natural habitat. I didn’t look that way, I feel quite certain—but I did look happy. There was nothing like a good dousing to awaken my sense of adventure.

It did have to be awakened, I was realizing. As we hiked, I tried to think of the combination of factors that coaxed it from its dormancy, but before I could name them, it was crawling back into its place and I was trembling all over. This hike was high and a little treacherous. I didn’t think I’d make it very far.

“Okay,” I finally said, sitting down on a rock behind Dylan. “I think that’s as far as I go.”

“What?” He looked back at me and smiled. “You have to go to the top. You have to see what’s up there!”

“See, Dylan—“ I drew in a dizzy breath— “Some fears are just in my head and I can say no to them pretty easy. But other fears bypass my head and go straight to my body, and those ones are a lot harder to shake.”

He kept moving forward as I spoke, slowly drawing me along after him, almost against my will. “Would it help you if I went behind you, so if you slip I can catch you?”

I hesitated, not wanting to accept his help. “Yes,” I finally said, and he motioned me onward ahead of him.

We ran into a little group that had stopped to rest and I sat down with them while Dylan ran forward with Elijah. I contemplated going back down but didn’t want to be exposed as a coward, so I finally pulled myself up and kept climbing. I moved slow and short of breath so that Vivek and Emi caught up to me.

“Ugh, I am so afraid of heights,” I heard Vivek admit. “I don’t know how I am doing this right now.”

“You’re doin’ great!” said Emi, the former sports min major, ever upbeat and lively. “You doin’ okay, Jessi girl?” she called, and I turned to give her a shaky smile.

“I don’t do heights either, Emi,” I said.

“Well, you’re doin’ great, too!” she responded and continued to chat for Vivek and I, distracting us. Somehow, we made it up that ridge and pretty soon we were clustered with several others, walking through a forest of reeds, when we heard it.

First, cacophonous laughter, followed by a thunderous splash. Cliff jumping, I thought, feeling slightly ill. In a moment, I recognized the voices of my friends, and I couldn’t help but smile. There was no way I was jumping off a cliff today—but it was still delightful to hear them having fun. As each person in front of me rounded the corner, I heard them gasp, and then I saw for myself.

There were no cliffs to jump off of, only a tiny pool with a natural waterslide and a little corner about ten feet deep into which one could plunge from a rock on the side. Twelve or fifteen of us could fit easily into the water, so I slipped off my shoes and socks and slid in to join my friends.

My sense of adventure had awakened once again.

...

I basked in the glow of En Gedi for a few days, though our trip only lasted until five o’clock that evening. “I don’t know why we don’t do things like that every weekend,” Gena remarked as we recounted it, and I nodded emphatically. It seemed like a good principle for life, really, to do something adventurous every week. I got up the next morning and purposed to outrun the melancholy that usually dogged me.

Homework and ordinary life lulled my sense of adventure to sleep, though, and before long, I was mopey and subdued as usual. It was such a frustrating pattern—not having fun put me into that place and that place sucked away my motivation to have fun. By Wednesday, I was holed up in my room again, slaving away on reading and worksheets and liking it. It was a little absurd.

Wednesday afternoon, we went to the Temple Institute, which was a bizarre experience that I won’t detail here. (I have to leave some things to be asked about when I come home.;) After the museum, Kelsey, Grace, Gena, and I headed over to the Aroma Cafe near the Old City, fully intending to do homework, and sat for two hours just talking. Grace pried into my sour emotions and I played hard to get, shy as usual at being exposed.

“How do you rest, Jessi Bee?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I responded, a lie. “Actually—that’s not true. I think sometimes I just say ‘I don’t know’ when I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“You gotta pry harder!” Gena cheered, but Grace shook her head.

“You’ll tell me,” she said, with a mischievous grin. “I could pry, but I don’t think I have to. I think you’ll tell me on this one.”

She was right. We spent the next half hour discussing rest and the challenges of getting it in Israel, and I let them probe and care and do all the things I secretly wished for. We were learning each other by heart, there in that coffee shop, tracing the patterns of virtues and vices across each personality. We were making a beginning with each other, scratching the surface. Once, I had been frustrated by this, maddened at the lack of depth to every interaction I had. Now, I saw its value. Real friendship didn’t form spontaneously out of vapor and attractive personalities—it was forged, gut-deep, learned like a craft, earned like trust. I couldn’t force it or hurry it along; I could only receive it with open hands as it grew, letting it create new, supple places in my heart.

Love was a discipline, driven into the psyche by many, many hours like this one—like anything, love required practice. And I was not as good at it as I claimed.

Humbled, I surrendered to the process and allowed my friends to lead me on.

...

Shabbat fell upon us as the girls gathered on the top floor, using face masks and watching West Side Story. A few of us dished out back rubs or painted each other's nails, chatting quietly, laughing sometimes. Dr. De Rosset joined us for a little while, singing along and offering commentary on the actors. It was good to be together.

In most seasons of my life, love had come with fury, overturning my emotions and breaking my heart. It was the reason I hated goodbyes, the reason I clung so dearly to what was right in front of me and hesitated to move on.

This time, though, love had come quietly, stealing in among what was already there, leaving everything intact. I wasn't sure why it had happened, and, for a long time, I fought it, wrestling to feel something intense and overpowering. I liked strong emotions. I liked ocean-deep connections. It was disconcerting not to feel so deeply.

And it was good, like Creation when God looked at it and saw what He had made. It was good to feel things gently, to let love dawn slow and not know the outcome. We would all go home in just a matter of weeks, and who knew if we would stay connected or move in a million different directions. But for this moment, we were all here, gathered on the top floor of a hostel in Jerusalem, ready to tackle the next adventure together.

And sometime in the near future, when our King Jesus touched down just a few miles away on the Mount of Olives, we would all gather here again. Our adventuring had just begun.