I Walked the Holy Land

After 10 days in Israel, I’m another man. Splashing in the Dead Sea, traversing about Galilee with an old friend, wandering the holy city of Jerusalem…I’ll never read Scripture the same.

As my epiphanies from this pilgrimage give way to the grind of school schedules, overflowing inboxes, and oil changes, I stop here to mark them. 

That land invited me into a greater story than the one that I have imagined for myself. An ancient story being written across centuries, still unfolding today.

I saw it so clearly there, but now, I want to forget. Because it takes too much courage to figure out how to live out my small part in this mighty tale that God has been telling. I’d rather fade back to the quotidian safety of my work and relationships. 

I sense I’m not alone. 

Courage to live out the spiritual task you’ve been given doesn’t come easy. Faced with the realities of the holy land, I realize I’ve underestimated what it took the heroes of my faith to execute the roles given to them. When I visited the ruins of the powerful Decapolis city of Beit Shean, I couldn’t stop thinking of Mary–the bucolic teenager suddenly pregnant, tasked with reporting the angel’s visit to her conservative Jewish community. As if convincing them wasn’t enough, she had to believe amidst the Roman powers that set up Beit Shean–towering over her people with might and technology–that God was casting down the powerful, and raising up the lowly like He said. By the time she sang the Magnificat, God had been silent for 400 years. Her courage to sing it anyway amidst all this is as much a miracle as the virgin birth. 

It is precisely this backwards, unlikely way that enchants the stories of Israel–this calling forward the weakest, most marginalized members of the community to do your bidding. It’s what Jesus did when he met the woman at Jacob’s well–Photina as she later became known. Considered as riff raff, this woman went alone for water in the heat of day. And He traveled out of His way just to meet her. 

On this journey, we also went out of our way to the well. Into the heart of the West Bank, past checkpoints with armed soldiers and burned out homes, we ventured deep into Palestine. Kind faces strike a contrast with the half built houses and car junkyards that dot the landscape.

Upon entering an ordinary Palestinian town, suddenly you come upon the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Photina. Descend the stairs into the crypt beneath, and there you find it–Jacob’s well. Here, you can sing, pray, read the story, and drink the water in awe. Unlike so many holy sites, no tour buses of pilgrims throng this place. It’s just you, a smiling priest, and the well. 

The hostility facing Palestine today is different from Samaria of the ancient world, yet highlights the same tension Jesus held when He met Photina in the heat of day. He moved toward her in courage, and Photina responded with the like. “Come meet a man who told me everything…the water He gives is like a well within you…”

So, how do I step forward in courage, weighed down as I am with the struggles of my heart and our world? I don’t know about you, but I have many fragmented puzzles to solve with my loved ones, church, and neighborhood. And just like in modern-day Israel and Palestine, our very land here in the US broods with complex issues of injustice and longing.

As I move into middle age, will I accept this invitation to courage, transcending deeper on my journey into this upside down story? Or, has my spiritual imagination become captive by the dream for autonomy, influence, and safety? Will I sedate this struggle with the same fledging promises of Baal, Babylon, and Mammon that warred against ancient Israel–now in a modern package? 

I can’t let that be enough for me. What about you?   

Could we imagine today, in our day, a new community that chooses instead:

Water for our enemies from the well

Healing at the pools

Life again at Nain

New wine in Cana

Forgiveness in Jericho

Compassionate welcome for today’s strangers, unclean and outcasts

Salt and light pouring into the darkest margins of our hearts and neighborhoods and world

Christ walked the land of Israel with a small band of brothers and sisters to give a vision for this. When he healed the sick, centered women and children, and celebrated with the rich and poor together, He showed us the beginning of a new order, a different kind of reign–what it looks like when God restores the world. A glimpse of what the new city will look like. I am making everything new. 

Like me, you are invited to play a unique role in this story–one that no one else can accomplish for you. It doesn’t matter where you are on the Jericho road–as beat down as blind Bartimeus or as trapped in broken systems of privilege as Zacheus. It’s never too late to join. You don’t have to have it all sorted to be part of this story. In fact, it actually seems like the more ragged and broken you are willing to show up, the better. 

But that paradox is the hardest part for me. If I’m going fully in, I want certainty. But, perhaps what I actually need is the courage to accept that I don’t get to shape or see every part of the story. Like the scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin admonishes:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Will you settle for the easier, competing stories beckoning you, or will you work and wait in courage as your place in the ancient story unfolds?

P.S. If you’re ready to plan out a pilgrimage yourself, check my video toolkit: Pilgrimage to Any Country for Pennies.  Here I lay out clear steps for how you can create an unbelievably affordable, meaningful experience that will enlarge your perspective and bless the world.