Travel Scribblings: Tour, Part 2

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

• Emi and Sofie, two more sweet friends
• Philip, Hunter, and Alex, good brothers

...

The day after we played games in my living room, I felt a change. We tumbled out of the bus at Chorazin, our first stop of the morning, and I ended up in a cluster of girls I didn’t normally find refuge in. All of us were bathed in the golden glow of early morning and I was struck by the beauty around me.

“Your eyes look really good today, Jessi,” Emi said sincerely, flashing me one of her gorgeous smiles. “They’re so green!”

I tilted my head, frowning. “Really?”

“Yeah!” One of the other girls came to look and pointed to the green sweater I was wearing. “When you wear green, they really pop.”

“Wait what? Lemme see!” Ryan T. came over, interested as usual in the latest happenings. He came close to my face and stared.

I squinted at him through his glasses. “Your eyes are the same color, Ryan.”

“Really?” he said, breaking into his trademark grin. “I have gorgeous eyes!”

We all laughed, and just then Mika came careening over to hug Emi and me around our necks, breaking up the moment into more peels of laughter. We were making progress.

Even so, my loneliness lingered. As the tour began, we stood in loosely formed clusters, all of us clinging to the few who really knew us. We had barely been here a month and, in an ordinary setting, we wouldn’t have minded moving slowly in friendships. But here, this was the only community we had. Sometimes, we felt our “other-ness” very acutely.

I say “we” because I had been hearing the same report from everyone: Almost everyone felt awkward and out of the loop, not good enough to be included. Everyone compared, everyone held back, everyone rehearsed the lies the Enemy fed us. And it made perfect sense. Satan would take any opportunity he got to threaten God’s work in forty young saints. But where I had always thought disunity looked like outright arguing and nastiness, he had another tactic. He whispered thoughts of insecurity and isolation, jealousy and comparison, and we ate them up like fresh bait. He reeled us in silently, without a fight, before we knew what was going on.

By the time we caught him, it had already happened—but I had no doubt it could be reversed.

...

After Chorazin, we took a boat out onto the Sea of Galilee. For most of the ride, we were rather bombarded with music and readings and the din of our group, but for about three minutes, our captain cut the motor and allowed us to sit in the stillness. The silence was jarring. I hadn’t realized how long it had been since we had been quiet. Slowly, I felt the calm of the water seep into my bones, and I almost felt I could muster up the faith to walk on the surface as Peter had. And then the music came back on, and we all started talking, and I remembered that Peter hadn’t been called to walk in stillness.

He had been called to walk in the storm.

...

We ate a lunch of fish, fresh from the lake, along with a half dozen other amazing dishes. Our servers just kept bringing things, more and more every time we thought we were surely finished. Again, I ate until I couldn’t eat anymore and sat squarely in the abundance of my Father’s blessing, just enjoying the outpour of His affection. That was all He was asking for, I felt quite certain. Very soon, we would go home to ministry and study and responsibilities—but today, we had only to rest in His grace. The Lord did fill us, even as He called us to empty ourselves.

After lunch, we hiked from the Mount of Beatitudes to Capernaum with a stop along the way to splash in a spring. That stop wasn’t planned but I guessed that Miriam pushed for us to be allowed to let off a little steam. We looked for all the world like a band of small children, impulsive and happy, not caring that the locals stared as we tramped back to the trail. Perhaps it was irreverent to enter our Savior’s hometown with wet clothes and muddy feet, but later I realized He had probably done it Himself a time or two.

…

That night at dinner, I made up my mind that I would stay in my room and rest. No more games, no more shenanigans--it was time to recuperate and store up for later. As I came to this decision, though, Ryan T. and Kai came up behind me.

“Hey Jessi Bee,” said Ryan, a little nervously. “We were, uh--we were just wondering--ya know, if anything was happening over at your place tonight.”

I hesitated momentarily, glancing over at Delaney to see if perhaps she would shoot it down, but she nodded in confirmation. “Uh--yeah, we could open it up.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them, but as I headed back to the room, I wondered if I would regret saying them.

We threw out the invitation in the group chat, but before anyone came over, Delaney and I were both stewing in the living room. We were tired and grumpy and easily attacked. All the lies came rushing back to fill up the space between us.

“What are we gonna do? We are both in bad places right now,” I acknowledged, and she nodded in gloomy agreement. As soon as I said it out loud, it became suffocating, so I left and sat in the lobby for a few minutes to compose myself. If this mood colored the whole night, no one would want to come over.

On my way back, I ran into Gena and Jashubi, who had been talking in the dining room for an hour. They were headed for my room, talking about what it means to be brothers and sisters in Christ, so I plastered on a smile and welcomed them. Delaney went to the bedroom to finish a podcast, but soon returned, and Ryan, Philip, Dylan, Grace, and Kai all wandered over a couple at a time. Within thirty minutes, we were having a rousing discussion on the family of God, everyone lively and invested, and redemption was in sight.

“Okay,” Jashubi interjected after we had talked for an hour or so. “So can we all go around and say how we each think we can be better brothers and sisters, like sisters say how brothers can be better, and vice versa?”

“Can we say how we each think we can do better personally?” Kai suggested, and Jashubi nodded heartily.

“Let’s do both!” said all the sisters in the room, and it was settled. Our unity was deepening.

We spent another hour going around the room, and then Jashubi asked if we could pray together. We ended the night earnestly petitioning the Father on behalf of our group, that we would understand what it truly meant to be family, and by the time everyone left, we were working on how to spread the word to the rest of our brothers and sisters.

...

The next day was a rest day, a rare luxury for touring Israel. Though sleeping in was tempting, Delaney and I roused ourselves to get to breakfast for a meeting with last night’s group. We had a worship night to plan.

We gathered around the table and discussed the needs of the group. If everyone was believing lies, we needed to fight those lies together. By the time our meeting was over, we had an outline for the night that reminded me of all the hypothetical ministry plans I’d had to make for school. This time, though, it was real. We were actually doing ministry for and with each other, and it was good.

We met after dark on the lawn by the Sea, where Jesus used to meet with His disciples. The planners came early to pray, and when we looked up, the rest of the group was trickling down and setting up all the lawn chairs we could get our hands on. I glanced around rather anxiously, hoping and praying that people would show up. I realized I hadn’t prayed much for this today, only looked forward to it, and my expectation were high. My first instinct was to lower them, lest I be disappointed, but a moment later I was whispering a new prayer instead:

“Lord, don’t just meet my expectations--exceed them.” He had said He was able to do more than all that I could ask or imagine; why not invite Him to?

We spent the night singing and telling each other the good things we saw in each other. The plan was to break into small groups, but the group spent such a long time affirming each other that we just left that the main focus, and ended in prayer. We intended to pray for the length of one song; after four songs, everyone was still going strong, some of us simply sitting together in the grace and love so tangibly poured onto us.

We sang one last song together and released them--but they didn’t leave. For almost an hour, everyone lingered under the stars, holding each other close and saying the things we’d needed to say but hadn’t had the freedom to. I was breathless with the beauty of it. There were real, actual strongholds being broken. We were actually beating back the devil. The truth of our Family shone radiantly in front of me, and in that moment I was not lonely, or afraid, or out of place. Anyone could see that we belonged together.

I went to bed with a full heart that night, eager to see what God would do with us next.

...

I wish that was the end of the story. But at 5:45 the next morning, the alarm went off and Delaney and I struggled to get out of bed. When I arrived at breakfast, some of the luster of our night remained; I could see it in the smiles as I walked in the door. But all in all, not much had changed. Our tendencies and personalities remained the same. We still had six and a half weeks ahead of us. Life was mundane, no matter how many breakthroughs we came across, and we wouldn’t live on the mountaintop forever.

I sank into my chair and wrestled with this.

Our first stop this morning was Dan, up in the north of Israel. The drive was gorgeous, the hike up even more beautiful, and we were fascinated by the ancient gravity of this place. Dan had once been a place of worship--idol worship. There was a metal frame built in the place where the altar would have been, and, just above that, the platform where the golden calf would have stood, lording over the people below. I gazed on the scene and still could not make sense of it. How could Israel so obviously abandon God?

All my life, the parallel had been drawn for me: Wasn’t my heart just as fickle as that of Israel? Didn’t I bow down to just as many idols? But standing here, I shook my head. My sins were secret, always kept under a heavy guise of impeccable Christianity. Theirs were public, clear violations of the Law they’d been given.

I had to look again and remember what my professors had said, when we saw the stones standing upright at other altars throughout the country: It was a syncretistic form of worship. The Israelites had often claimed to worship Yahweh, while making images and setting up stones. The idols, they said, were how Yahweh represented Himself. They smoothed them over and covered them up with religion and half-truths.

How could I think I was any different? My heart didn’t need the blatant stage of an altar in the hills of Dan; there were plenty of high places for it to bow down. I had my own mountaintops, which were fraught with idols of emotion and significance, diluting my worship and distracting me from the one, true God.

I had no ridicule for the Israelites at Dan. Their disease still runs within my veins.

…

It was fitting that our next stop was Caesarea Philippi, the region in which Jesus spoke His famous words to Peter: “On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) We looked into the Temple of Pan, yet another place of idol worship in Israel, and I remembered the sermons I’d heard on Christ’s words. Gates are not offensive weapons, the preachers often said. Jesus meant that the Church would storm hell and take it down.

That was the definition of a breakthrough. Even the hell in me could not outlast the war Christ was waging on it. My sins were the sins of the Danites--but my hope was the hope of Peter. If the Lord could make a foundation out of thick-headed, impetuous Peter, surely He could make a brick out of me. Out of any of us in that group. And indeed He had, and would continue to, building us up as living stones. That meant unity, a unity He produced and cultivated among us.

Our night before had been a glimpse of His working, only a preview. Someday, we would see it in its fullness, and no mountaintop would ever compare.

...

We went next to the Syrian border, piling out at an overlook on the side of the road. It was cold up here in the Golan Heights, and we huddled together, drawing warmth from each other, as Tal explained the root of the conflicts between Israel and Syria. It was complicated, and difficult, and I could not pick a side. Wading into the politics of the Middle East had been more than I bargained for when I signed up for the trip.

People in the States were afraid of what was happening here. Some of my classmates’ parents worried incessantly about our safety. But what I saw when I came here was not danger to myself. It was a conflict occurring completely around and outside of me, while I remained in my convenient bubble of safety, untouched by any of the heartbreak and trauma of this place.

Thousands of others did not have this luxury. Tal told us of another Moody student, who had stood here before us a few years ago, and she was Syrian. On that day, they had seen explosions on the other side of the border, and she had burst into tears. Her family lived over there. She could not remain in convenience and safety; she could not remain untouched. These conflicts were personal to her.

“She burst into tears,” Tal told us, “and all the Moodies comforted her.”

I’m sure they did, I thought, looking around at our fellowship, huddled together on the side of the hill in the peace of this day. If it had been one of us, the rest would have been instantly at the ready, bearing up our broken brother or sister.

I realized later that we, too, had Family on both sides of that border, and we were called to weep with all of them.

…

The next morning found us at Beit She’an, where King Saul had died so many years before. It was a short hike to get there and I caught up with Mika as we walked, hoping for a good conversation.

Mika, Ella, and Gena were the older sisters of the group, all of them possessing just a bit more life experience than the rest of the girls. Mika in particular adopted this posture, albeit unconsciously, and gave off an air of quiet wisdom whenever she spoke. She was funny and crazy and valued relationships deeply. Though I didn’t know it for sure, I guessed that no one in our group had escaped her notice, and she was watching as intently as I was for how we would fare together.

All of this drew me to her and simultaneously left me feeling like a gangly fourteen-year-old as I fell into step beside her. I asked her a question that was too deep and obscure for this early in the morning, and she helped me shape it into something she could answer. “I dunno, I’m just looking for questions, Mika,” I huffed. “I’m bad at talking to people.”

“That’s a lie,” she said, matter-of-fact. “I’ve heard you talk to people.” These were the words of a true sister, calling out untruths as she saw them, without batting an eye. She moved on to answer the question, but I treasured up that remark, letting it move me to love again.

We crested the hill, and Mika gasped before I turned to look. Far below us stood the ancient city of Beit She’an, regal and imposing even still. We had seen enough ruins to know that this was magnificently preserved; none of the other cities we had seen were anywhere near this complete. It was an archeological marvel.

We wandered the city for a while, sat on the toilets in the old bathhouses, and sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness” in the theatre. It was a good start to the morning. Our only other stop was Jericho, which was rather a letdown since the city had long since fallen down. From Jericho, we drove the hour and a half south to the final leg of our journey--the region of the Dead Sea.

…

From Jericho onward, the climate and landscape changed completely, from the lush green of Galilee to the arid desert of the Negev. I felt my soul dry up a little in the process. For all its salty mystique, though, the Dead Sea was beautiful. We arrived at our resort, which was luxurious in itself, and everyone dashed for swimsuits and towels. The time had come to float.

Due to an unfortunate injury, however, I had decided not to go in today. I’d heard enough horror stories; what was the point of going in only to run out moaning in pain? I sat in my bedroom and pretended to be content, one eye on the window watching for my friends. The day was perfect, the hottest we’d had all of tour, and even from inside I could enjoy the beauty of the weather. God had not abandoned me.

Still, the self-pity started to creep in after a while, and I began to search for a way to combat it. Everyone came in, the sun went down, and I grew restless.

As usual, God gave me Grace. Her text came through just as dusk settled over the sea: “Are you napping? Or are you awake and want a visitor?”

Instantly, my walls were up. I didn’t need her pity. “Awake and want a visitor,” I said, “but don’t come if you have something more fun to do.”

“Something more fun than hanging with my girl Jessi?” she said, with a smiley face. “Ya crazy.”

I broke into my own smiley face and told her to come on over. We were both tired and content, so we discussed a range of mostly unimportant topics while flopping around on my bed. At one point, we fell silent while she looked up a Pinterest board, and as she leaned against the headboard, I studied her, upside down, from my place at her feet. Grace’s beauty was a quiet one, not striking when she walked into the room, but dawning slowly as you got to know her. “You have such a pretty smile, Grace,” I said, watching the crease deepen around her sweet brown eyes as she tried to not smile in response.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, vulnerable but not defensive.

We were silent a moment longer, until I said, with uncharacteristic boldness, “Why did you come in here?”

She laughed, knitting her brows at me. “What do you mean? I just wanted to hang out!” She meant it. There was no trace of pity in her voice. She had truly just wanted to be with me.

“I thought it was because you felt sorry for me,” I said, a little more timid.

           

“No!” She shook her head at this ridiculous notion. No, she was a truer friend than that; it didn’t take sympathy to move her to love me. She just did, like God did, and that was the end of it. No wonder He had seen fit to give her her name.

...

“Sofie!” I called her across the hotel driveway, where everyone was lining up to board the bus. I had invited her into my room last night and we’d spoken just long enough to know we wanted to be bus buddies.

“There you are!” Her smile came easy and full of energy, a good demonstration of who she was. It would be fun to sit beside her today.

In contrast to Mika, Sofie was the little sister of the group, complete with a long red braid and a mischievous streak. As we settled into our seats, Hunter turned around and saw us. “Oh no, it’s you again,” he said, and Sofie cackled quietly. Hunter looked at me desperately. “Can you try to control her, please?”

I shrugged. “We’ll see.”

We set off under the desert sky, which today was filled with pregnant clouds, a rare sight this far south. The rain started as we pulled out, but stopped just in time for our first site of the day: Masada.

Masada held more historical significance for Israel as a nation than for us as students of the Bible, but our group still hushed with awe as Tal recounted the tragic end of the Jews who had lived here once. Some of us had read the story before; it was a hard one. As the Romans swept through Israel, subduing every city in their path, the Jews at Masada decided it was better to die free than to be captured as slaves. They fought an intense battle when the Romans arrived, but it soon became clear that the Romans had the upper hand. Holding to their values, the ten leaders of the city killed all of its citizens overnight, then drew lots to kill each other. When the Romans arrived, everyone was dead, save a few women and children who heard of the plan and hid.

And here we stood, on the same ground that drank in their blood, gawking like the tourists we were, safe and sound in our rich, Western skin.

I didn’t know how to hold history well. Slowly, as I toured this country that had so rarely known peace, the Spirit was waking me from my apathy. My eyes were open to the injustice and sin that littered the story of humanity and I didn’t know what else to do but cry in my spirit, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!”

I had never meant it so deeply in my life.

...

We ended the day in the Wilderness of Zin, where the Israelites once wandered. Someone remarked later that it they were struck by the barrenness of it. “How could you survive without God?” he questioned aloud. You couldn’t, was the rhetorical answer. Here in the desert, we saw with our own eyes the magnitude of the faithfulness God had shown.

The next day, we saw it again, as we drove through the mountains and saw a sight even our Israeli driver had never seen: streams in the desert. They cut their way over ridges and across roads, tumbling over the rocks into waterfalls, all the way down to the Dead Sea. The rain changed our plans and dampened the happiness I drew from the sun--but I drank it in like the rest of the beauty we had seen. This was more abundance, poured out over us and all the land, grace upon grace upon grace.

...

“Blessed are the flexible,” Dr. Coakley always said, “for they shall not be disappointed.”

So we were rolling with it. The rain had closed the roads to En Gedi and cancelled our plans to ride camels, so we were headed to Beersheba instead. The temperature had dropped significantly and some of us had forgotten our rain jackets, so we tumbled out of the bus bracing ourselves against the cold and damp. The loneliness came stealing in again as we tramped and shivered around Beersheba. I was relieved when we finally returned to the bus and I could slip in my earbuds until we reached the next impromptu schedule change.

Today, I sat next to Alex, who was famous for his corny jokes and his photography. He was funny and safe and a pleasant surprise for this last day of travel. Even sitting with him in silence was a sweet thing, and I thanked God for it.

But I wanted to be sitting next to Emilene. The day before, Gena and I had discussed wanting to get to know her more deeply. “I feel like Emilene already is one of my people,” Gena had said, and I nodded.

“You got to room with her,” I responded, regretting for the umpteenth time this week that my last name didn’t start with T. “You’re lucky.”

“I know,” Gena said, chuckling.

“But I’ll sit next to her on the bus tomorrow.” I had said this with more resolution than I felt. For all the sweetness of our coffee date, Emilene still scared me. We’d had a few conversations since that first meeting, all of them good, but I couldn’t move past the insecurity. She had firm boundaries, which she had expressed without compromise, and I had a clingy personality. I was terrified of overstepping, of touching the wrong thing and snapping her shut forever.

This fear hid in the background most of the time and I denied it. Get over it, I told myself. If you ignore it for long enough, it’ll go away. I gathered up all of my clingy tendencies and kept them at bay by avoiding Emilene, speaking when spoken to and pursuing friendship only to the degree that I could control. I would conquer this stupid thing by myself. I didn’t need anyone else.

Sitting on the bus, I could control, but it was intimidating enough that I let it go when she didn’t respond to my text. She wouldn’t want to anyway, I told myself, relaxing into the seat next to Alex. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about asking perfect questions.

I was resting in this tentative relief when my phone buzzed. I picked it up, expecting some activity from our lively group chat, and saw a message from Emilene: “Oh...well...this is an awkward time to find this message…So sorry girl.”

“Lol,” I responded, playing it off. But what to say next…? “I should have come to find you at breakfast!” --I hesitated a split second before I went for it-- “I’m sorry I’m afraid and still haven’t learned how to pursue you well!”

“Ayo, K Bee, just be bold,” she said with a wink. “Fear not, I do not bite.”

“You do sometimes,” I replied, winking back. “But I’ll learn, I promise."

“Just curious,” she said, “how have I ‘bitten’ you this far? I am trying to work on my gentleness.”

I thought for a long time before typing out my response, and when I began, my fingers trembled a little. “It was the comment at the end of our first meeting, about shutting me out and not being sad about it if I tried to touch your pain.” As I said it, I regretted not admitting it sooner. I’d held it between us for far too long, perpetuating a rift between myself and a sister even as I worked for the unity of our group. “It was necessary to say, and funny, and your intentions were fine, so it’s absolutely not something to feel shame or regret or whatever over, but all of a sudden it felt like a lot of the normal ways I pursue friendship were dangerous and I just wasn’t sure how to try to get close to you without losing you.” I hit send and waited a moment before adding, “Does that make sense?”

“That makes perfect sense!” was her quick response. “Let’s continue this conversation soon. In person. I have some clarifying to do.”

I had forgotten the freedom of confession. So often, I just gritted my teeth and stifled my sin and pain. For everyone else, I encouraged dialogue in the tiniest of conflicts, knowing we were not meant for isolation and broken relationships, but for myself, I preached no grace and all the effort. Just fix yourself, for goodness sake. Don’t involve anybody else. You can work to close the gap between you and God and all His people--just try harder.

This was the false gospel I lived.

But as soon as Emilene’s message came through, I was flooded with such relief that tears sprang into my eyes. My loneliness fled, and a sense of the nearness of Jesus came to take its place. At first, I resisted this reaction, worried that it was more proof of my neediness and sickness of spirit. But then I heard His whisper: You don’t have to do this alone. I checked to make sure Alex was still sleeping, and allowed the tears to fall.

This was the gospel, the real gospel that I was so prone to forget--Jesus died so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. It was always good, always healing, and still my heart ran the other way. But in this moment, it had caught me by surprise and I remembered its sweetness.

All day, I felt the glow of this release. We drove to the Hill Country and spent two hours just hiking and taking in the beauty around us. The sun came out and the scent of wildflowers permeated every breath I took. I wanted to dance and sing for the goodness of it. The faithfulness of God was absurd, ridiculous. And yet it was true.

...

Aliyah. It’s a Hebrew word meaning “to go up,” and Jews use it to describe their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Throughout my life, I have heard about it, how all the men of Israel went up three times a year to celebrate the Jewish holidays. I have read the Psalms of Ascents, which were written to be sung on these pilgrimages, and imagined what it would be like to see the City of God rising in the distance after such a long journey.

Now, I didn’t have to imagine.

We rode into Jerusalem singing, all of us electrified with our homecoming. And in a small way, it did feel like home. We stopped at an overlook, where fog shrouded the Judean Wilderness, and read Isaiah 40 as the conclusion to our journey:

Why do you complain, Jacob?
    Why do you say, Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord;
    my cause is disregarded by my God”?
Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
    and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary
    and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary,
    and young men stumble and fall;

but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:27-31)

As the fog cleared and we saw the now familiar streets of our temporary home, I could feel deep within my bones that it was true.