Believe it! The snow fall was so beautiful yesterday. And this morning dawned clear and bright. Patty and I walked into church. Two worshipers were already there, and we ended up with 10 for the 8:30 service! At the 11:00 service there were 28! A quiet morning, of informal worship and sharing of friendship.   [...]

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I’ve illustrated my previous blogs with pictures. Check out the blogs again!

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In the lectionary I use for daily prayer, this morning’s gospel reading is from John 6. The chapter begins, “After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee …” In the gospel stories set in this location, Jesus is frequently crossing to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, whenever [...]

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Before going on this trip, I thought all of Israel was desert. (That’s what you see in all those cheesy movies about Jesus, isn’t it?) But Israel, a country about the same size as New Jersey, features an amazing variety of geography. Within a few hours of driving, there is desert, the Dead Sea (the [...]

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Several hours of being wide-awake last night.  The gift of wakefulness is an opportunity to read another short story by Alice Munro.  Last night I came across this paragraph from her exquisite story, “Runaway,” in which a woman is describing a recent trip to Greece: “Where I was, this little village, this little tiny village [...]

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I’m writing this from home. There was a problem getting onto the Internet at our last hotel, in Tiberius, so I’m sorry that I haven’t been timely. It’s also the evening of the day I’ve gotten home. So, we’ll see how long I last and how coherent the writing is, with the jet lag and [...]

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Something extremely unusual happened last night. It rained. All night. And, since Ein Gedi is right next to the Salt/Dead Sea, which is the lowest elevation on the entire earth, all of Israel (well, as far north and west as Jerusalem) drains into the Sea. There is one main north-south road in this part of [...]

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Sabbath peace, from the Kibbutz Ein Gedi, on the Dead Sea. This is a wonderful day off from the relentless schedule of the tour. I slept eight and a half hours last night — until 7:30 AM — and spent a leisurely hour and a half doing Morning Prayer and reading the Bible and thinking [...]

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We’ve spent two FULL days in the holy city of Jerusalem, under the expert guidance of Dr. Monte Luker, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, in Columbia, SC. (The two other professors along provide occasional commentary.) We have spent time on Temple Mount (where the temple was during Jesus’ time; where [...]

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I’m in Jerusalem! We’ve been in Egypt the past four days. We were in Cairo the first two, and I felt like it was warp speed touring. We saw the Egyptian Museum, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and some other sites, but I didn’t feel like we spent enough time at any of them. It was [...]

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