Travel Scribblings: Tour, Part 1

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

• Mika, Hannah G., and Holly, another three of the wonderful women on this trip
• Miriam, our coordinator, a Moody grad--I wanna be like her when I grow up
• Tal, our Israeli tour guide

...

“Group dynamic says that by week four, you’ll all wanna kill each other.” Dr. Sanchez made his grim prediction around week two, with a maniacal gleam in his eye as he surveyed our group of mostly strangers. When he said that, we were just starting to linger after meals to talk. I hoped we would know each other well enough in four weeks for that kind of frustration; at that moment, I couldn’t really imagine feeling anything toward most of the group, let alone anger.

Well, dear reader, we have reached week four, and contrary to Dr. Sanchez’s prediction, we are just starting to really like each other. I sat down on Monday morning next to sweet, sassy Mika, and she said with tenderness in her voice, “I’m excited to see what tour does for our group.”

“I know, me too!” I said, smiling. Those long days would grow us closer like little else.

“What do you think’ll happen, Miriam?” Mika looked up at our coordinator, Miriam, who was joining us for tour.

Miriam made a skeptical face that mirrored Dr. Sanchez’s prediction. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging rather hopelessly. Mika and I laughed and turned back toward each other.

“I think it’ll be good for us,” I said quietly.

“I do, too,” she agreed.

Come Wednesday morning, we would find out.

...

“Is the bucket free?” I heard Hannah G’s melodic voice call on the landing.

“Yeah!” one of the boys responded.

She gasped in delight, and I heard her tear down the stairs to get it, calling “Toda!” as she went. Preparing forty-five people for tour with only one washing machine was no joke.

...

I knew I was getting comfortable here when I could sit on my bed in the soft light and the warmth and recognize that I needed a hug.

I’d been restless for the last hour. Feeling unable to make small talk, I had left dinner early, only to sit squirming on my bed. I’d spent most of the afternoon in the Old City working on homework and by the end I found myself longing for the refuge of the hostel, an instinct leftover from years of anxiety and yearning to go home. I wasn’t afraid anymore, just ready to be where I felt most safe. But now I’d returned to safety and I still felt unsettled. “Touch,” I realized suddenly. “I haven’t had touch.” I didn’t want to move from my spot but it seemed right to go out in search of a friend, so I hopped up and grabbed a tea bag as my excuse to go downstairs.

As I rounded the corner into the dining room, the scent of cinnamon and chocolate permeated the air around me and I heard Grace and Holly giggling as they came out of the kitchen. I went in to find a mug and discovered Kelsey transferring cookies from a baking sheet onto a plate. She was just enough shorter than me to be the perfect size for hugging, and the cookies smelled amazing, so I lingered.

“Hey Jessi,” she said, a whisper of a smile crossing her face. “Want a cookie?”

“Is that a question?” I asked, and she placed one on a napkin and gave it to me.

I leaned up against the sink and broke into the gooey goodness in my hand, looking into Kelsey’s hazel eyes and trying to think of a deep question to ask her. I couldn’t, so we made small talk until a few others clambered in and the moment ended. “I’m gonna go make a phone call,” Kelsey said, slipping away. “We’ll hang out later, yeah?”

I nodded, half-smiling as I watched her go. Kelsey was like afternoon light: No matter how much you enjoyed her, you couldn’t make her stay—but when she was there, she made everything warmer and brighter.

...

One day, when I was particularly lonely and bored with homework, I popped in my earbuds, turned on some dance music, and imagined what it would be like when we all got to heaven and knew each other perfectly. I pictured everyone in the group laughing and dancing with Jesus and wished we could be there now.

“Miriam says we’re walled off from each other,” Gena told me. “Which is significant because she’s seen the other groups.”

It was a discouraging thought. The Israel trip was historic for forging lifelong friendships, but at the moment, we all seemed to be suffering from loneliness. To think that it was self-inflicted was even more upsetting, especially because I couldn’t take anyone else’s walls down and I didn’t feel like taking down mine.

My roommates and I were spearheading the worship effort during the trip, and we had scheduled a worship night the night before we left for tour. I was nervous it would be rather haphazard since we would all be packing, but we went for it anyway, knowing it was what the group needed. We decided we would do several songs and then a small group time with questions to help the group get to know each other. I woke up the morning of and prayed fervently for a breakthrough.

When evening came, about half of the group gathered in the dining room, bringing their stress and walls and weariness with them. The first part was easy: we sang and didn’t have to speak. And it was sweet. Their voices mingled with half a dozen lovely harmonies and there was an energy in the room that hadn’t been there before we started. I stood back to watch, delighted.

As the last song came to a close, though, my heart thudded a little. I was leading questions and I wanted it to work. My ambitions were always to unlock each and every one of them, to free them to be vulnerable and weak and to become strength and encouragement for each other. There was pure, God-honoring desire behind this, to be sure—and there was also selfishness. God had an agenda for this night, too, and it wasn’t necessarily mine.

I wrestled with Him a little on this point. “Give us sweetness, Jesus,” I pleaded, begging for the sensitivity toward each other that always made me feel loved and important. “You know what I’m talking about. Please, God, give it to us.”

“And if I don’t?” He asked, with tenderness.

I wilted a little, but I was learning obedience. “Then You don’t,” I responded, sincerely trying to submit, and then I raised my voice to organize them into small groups.

...

Two hours later, the hostel was humming. We all should have been asleep, but instead, someone had put on music and we were dancing up and down the stairs as we packed. Hugs and ice cream were passed around, and laughter rang out through every level of the house. I was too excited to sleep, even after I finished packing. The buzz of energy coursing through my whole person could rightly be described as exultation.

Jesus didn’t have to give us fellowship like this—but He had done it anyway.

...

At 7:30 the next morning, our energy was gone, and we were nodding off on a tour bus just as the sun was bathing Jerusalem in golden light. Our first destination was the Elah Valley, where David fought Goliath.

Jerusalem was not ugly, but it paled in comparison to the rest of the country. We flew by fields of bright green wheat while our tour guide, Tal, told us that we had come at one of the best times of the year. “Everything is blooming,” he said, and nothing more than the national flower of Israel, the anemone. We pulled off to tramp toward the Brook of Elah, the birthplace of David’s five smooth stones, and saw all of the anemones’ red faces, so bright that at first, I thought they were flag markers.

The sun was just cresting in the distance as we read the famous epic from 1 Samuel 17, and our breath was stolen away. I drank in the beauty with an insatiable thirst, satisfied somehow in the longing it awakened in me.

It was right to long for beauty, I realized later. It pointed to the Beauty I was made for.

...

Tal led us up to the top of a hill in the Guvrin Valley, warning us not to stray off the path, because the place was littered with ancient basements, and some were deep. It made sense, then, when he led us to the ruin of a house and descended into the ground by a couple of stairs. Five or six people started following him and I figured they would pop back up in a moment on the other side of the foundation. But they didn’t. And more and more people kept following them.

Finally, it was my turn and I saw that we were actually heading underground. Surely the basement couldn’t be big enough to hold all of us?

As the shadow of the ceiling crossed my face, I ducked down to see through the dim—and gasped. This was not the tiny basement of an Iron Age home, but something much, much bigger. It sprawled cavernously back for thirty feet or so, with four short corridors branching off the main walkway. Into the walls were carved dozens of small holes, into and out of which pigeons fluttered from time to time.

“Do you know what this is?” Tal asked in his light Israeli accent.

We all shook our heads no, craning our necks to see every corner in the dim light.

“It’s for pigeon breeding.” He explained how the citizens of this town had raised hundreds of pigeons as livestock in this underground coop. “And see, they like it even still,” he said, pointing up at the birds.

We murmured awe at the little surprise, which Tal had no doubt intended, and I smiled to see the whole group giddy in wonder. I forgot about wonder most of the time, forgot about how much we needed it. I was thankful God did not forget.

...

We stopped for lunch at a strip mall near the formerly Philistine city of Ashkelon, and Tal handed each of us fifty shekels with which to buy whatever we pleased. About twenty of us filled up a sketchy little joint that we knew by now how to operate. All over the country, you could find these tiny places, looking like they violated a thousand United States health code regulations, and they specialized in two things: falafel and shawarma. No matter where you went, it was delicious.

I’d been craving shawarma for over a week now, so I stepped up to the counter and ordered with excitement, handing the cashier my fifty-shekel note and murmuring “Toda” as he gave me my change.

“‘Vakasha,” he responded without a smile, and looked to the next person in line.

We powered through lunch and drove to Ashkelon, where every one of us was thoroughly distracted by a glimpse of the Mediterranean, the first of most of our lives. Tal called us back to order and launched into a brilliant exposition on the city’s history, of which I heard very little. A whole day with little time to be inside my head left me distracted and withdrawn, but I joined Meghan and Danielle on the walk by the sea and we laughed.

As the sun was setting, we pulled up to our hotel, which was right on the coast, much to our delight. We got our room assignments, filled our bellies with a feast of roasted vegetables and schnitzel, and fell asleep breathing in the salty air of the sea.

...

The next day, we walked the beaches of Caesarea Maritima, where Paul gave his testimony before King Agrippa, and watched the surf come in from the ruins of the Hippodrome. We drove to the peak of Mount Carmel to see where Elijah faced off against the prophets of Baal, stopping for falafel along the slopes. There were breathtaking views around every corner.

Somehow still, I was lonely. I didn’t feel well today and nobody seemed to be able to tell, not to mention that everyone I wanted to be friends with was bonding with someone else. I was jealous and frustrated. All this beauty surrounding us, and I had the attitude of a disappointed five-year-old.

“God,” I prayed pathetically, “please take care of me.” No fire fell from heaven to prove He was listening, nor was there a still, small voice to soothe my fickle emotions. Too selfish, was the judgment I pronounced on my own request, and, not waiting for an answer, I tried to count the blessings around me.

My spirit remained numb.

After lunch, we drove down into the valley toward Megiddo’s peak, and Tal taught us the Hebrew word for mountain: har.

“Har Megiddo,” he rehearsed with us, and we repeated it with enthusiasm, soon understanding the connection with our own lives: “It’s often incorrectly pronounced Armageddon.”

As we pulled up to the tel, I heard Hannah G. whisper behind me, “We get to come back here someday.” Someday, when the Lord’s army assembled in the last days, we would be here preparing for battle.

I hoped He wouldn’t be needing us today, though, because I didn’t feel like fighting. I found my place in our semicircle around Tal and tried to force my focus onto his words. Instead, I found my gaze wandering in every direction, until it rested solidly on Grace’s fond smile.

Tour was teaching me the art of non-verbal communication. Being a good Moody student, I ascribed somewhat to the insights of Gary Chapman in the Five Love Languages. I had always considered myself a diehard words-of-affirmation person, with quality time as a close second. I wanted to have uninterrupted conversations with people, all of us paying fixed attention to each other, and I wanted to hear them say that they loved me and why. And there was nothing wrong with these desires in and of themselves.

The problem arose when times like tour came around and I pouted because I wasn’t being filled like usual. But suddenly, I realized that was why all of the looks and hugs were so very important. In a different way than usual, they offered us an ability to communicate love. Unconsciously, all of the girls had figured this out and were acting on it: leaning against each other, clasping hands, rubbing backs, kissing cheeks and tops of heads. Our connections were quiet ones, but they were strong.

And in this, I heard the answer to my stubborn, selfish prayer. As Grace walked over and pulled me close, I knew: Loneliness lied. God heard my prayers and provided for my needs, every single time.

...

As evening fell, I set off with Delaney, Kai, and Dylan for a walk to the ruins of Dor, just up the hill from our hotel. Our friends were scattered across the beach, swimming and collecting seashells. A few of the guys had descended the cliffs behind Dor and were just coming back up, shirtless and adrenaline-crazed, as we arrived.

We explored a pit in the ground, which we supposed had once been a house, or perhaps a pirate cave, and played around on the rocks until the sun sank beneath the waves in the distance. In the rosy dusk, we walked back barefoot on the sand, until we ran into the swimmers. Though I had worn my swimsuit under my clothes, I had resolved that the water was far too cold for my liking and I would just let them call me lame as I stood on dry land. I could enjoy the fun from a distance.

This was all well and good, until I saw Delaney enter the water. “Ugh,” I groaned to Kai, who had shared my resolution. “If my roommate is doing it, I guess I will, too.”

“Alright, then,” Kai sighed, not disguising the fact that he really did want to, like I did. He was in the water first, smiling in spite of himself, and I laughed as I followed, plunging into the surf. It took my breath away.

Emilene swam toward me, grinning. “I’m so proud of you,” she said, knowing my timidity without me having said it. I could only respond with shivering gulps and gasps, but I followed her out to where Delaney, Dylan, and Kai were diving through waves as they crested. In a moment, I regained enough oxygen to join them, giggling like a toddler over the whole thing. We were swimming in the Mediterranean, together. Just in case, I was extra careful to take it all in.

We might never all pass this way again.

...

Item one on the itinerary for Day Three was Nazareth, where Jesus was raised. Tal took us up on the ridge overlooking the city and said, “I’m going to teach you a very important lesson: It’s called ‘Peeling the Onion.’” He gestured to the buildings clustered suffocatingly close together across the valley. “You have to imagine this place two-thousand years ago. It was not like this. You would see terraces, where they’d have the vineyards, and maybe twenty or thirty houses. That’s it.”

In my mind’s eye, I could almost see it—almost. But to give us a better picture, Tal took us to Nazareth Village, a reenactment of what life was like in Jesus’ day. It was built on a tel, which meant the ruins of Nazareth were the backdrop against which the quiet drama unfolded.

We ate lunch in Nazareth Village, and it was one of the best meals we’d eaten since being in the country. We were served lentil stew and oven-fired flatbread, hummus and fresh olive oil, roasted chicken legs crusted with rosemary, and apples with date butter for dessert—all of it grown and made on site. It was decadent, and I was filled again with wonder that this was the grace God had lavished on me. And He delighted to! He enjoyed pouring over me an abundance I could not repay, because it drew my eyes to His glory and moved me to thanksgiving.

I ate until I could hardly eat any more, savoring every bite. My gift to Him was to receive.

...

We spent a few minutes in reflection on Mt. Arbel, where Jesus used to pray, and all of us wished we could linger there. Alas, it was off to Magdala, where I got to recite Scripture in an attempt to revive our whole motley crew, and then—finally—to our new hotel.

...

I have a strong concept of home, probably because I grew up in a good one. Much of my time is devoted to cultivating places of peace and safety to invite people into, and I wasted no time when Delaney and I were assigned our new quarters. This time, it was a full apartment, replete with a gorgeous view of the Sea of Galilee, and we were staying for four whole days.

I unpacked completely.

I hadn’t had this much square footage to call my own since coming to Israel, and it felt like a weight lifted off of my shoulders as soon as I had settled in. I couldn’t wait to have people over.

On Smith Four, where I used to live, Delaney and I were the cherished and hospitable older sisters. People wanted to come over. Our room smelled good and exuded serenity. We were very proud of the haven we’d created and I hadn’t realized how much stock I had put in it. It gave me identity and status, and I loved it.

In Israel, the culture was different—not just with the locals, but with the Moodies, too. This group wanted to hang out in the common spaces playing games every evening, and my dreams of ushering them in and caring for their emotional needs were rather wilted after the first time I sent out the invitation. Loving these people would look different than loving the ones back home. Loving these people meant leaving my safe places to sit in the vulnerability of a game. It took me a long time to come to terms with this, and I spent most of that time grumbling and complaining.

The night we arrived at the hotel, we sent out a message that our room was open to hang out, much to the chagrin of the game people. I was annoyed; I had no idea such a little thing could be so divisive. Maybe Sanchez was right about the group dynamic after all.

But around 8:15, I saw a small army of brothers and sisters trooping through the front lawn. They had decided it wasn’t worth dividing over, and they had come to bless us by accepting our invitation. We played games in my living room that night, the best of both worlds, and somehow by the end, everyone loved each other just a little bit more.