My Israeli Adventures (PART 1)

Hello, lovelies!

First of all, I'm SO sorry it took so long to get a new post up. I had originally planned to have blog posts scheduled to go up while I was away, but I was extremely buried under schoolwork and other prepping things for college that I had to get done before I left, and that ate up a lot of my time. Also, I didn't have a chance to pick up a laptop right away since I'd been home after my trip, which is also why I didn't get posts up as quickly as I had hoped.

In case you haven't been keeping up with me and adventures, I left for Israel at the end of May, and came back at the beginning of June. It was about two weeks total, and I had the privilege of getting to have Ray Vander Laan as the leader (we called him our rabbi) of this journey. He had us on some intense hiking regimes every day, but it was so incredible to get to learn about the Jewish culture and how those roots are connected to different aspects of Christianity today.

On a side note, in this post my faith and my thoughts will be present, but I will NOT be shoving any views down your throat. That's not my place, and I honestly don't want anyone to feel like they need to think like I do or do the things I do. So regardless of what you believe, I hope you'll enjoy reading this post and seeing the pictures I took of the incredible landscape. I'll try to be somewhat brief in each day's section since I don't want this post to be ten years long since it'll be five anyway.

And now that that word vomit is out of the way, on to the details of my Israel trip!

(PS: if you want to hear more about my trip, PLEASE feel free to DM me on any of my personal or blogger social media accounts, email me, or anything along those lines. I wish I could take you each out for coffee to tell you all about it, but logistically that just wouldn't work.)

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Since my phone storage was limited, I backed up all my pictures on Google Photos, and this way you'll all also be able to see them, which is super exciting. I've organized each day into an album, and for the most part the pictures in the albums are in order of what we did, with the exception of just a few of them. I've also added location names and little descriptions to the majority of my pictures (which you can see by clicking the little "i" icon), so you'll get a little sense of where I was during my two weeks.

Also, the albums are underneath my real name because that's the email account I used, so as always, please be respectful and don't leave any comments that may be hurtful to myself or to any of the people pictured. Basically, just be lovely like you normally are. (:

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DAY 1:

Click HERE to view the rest of Day 1's pictures.

After a bus ride to Chicago and loooong set of flights that lasted about twelve hours total, we all were so ready for bed. Our first morning kicked off with breakfast a little bit after six in the morning, and then a bus ride to our first location. We started in Gezer, and passed through the ruins of old city gates, which were supposed to be places that cared for the poor and became the heart and soul of a city.

We also dipped into the areas where Samson, David, and Goliath would have been, which was also incredible to see.

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DAY 2:

Click HERE to view the rest of Day 2's pictures.

The Negev Desert was where the first part of Day 2 took us. Here we learned about broom trees, which is what you see pictured above. They're sort of scraggly and short, but they're pretty much the only source of shade in the desert. In the same way, we ought to be that type of shade and help for those who are experiencing deserts in their own lives.

From there we were in Tzin, and a Roman pretorium was our next stop. We learned about a Roman triumph which essentially said that the emperor was a god, and how Mark's book of the Bible sets up Jesus' crucifixion to be in the same order of events that a triumph would be in, which is really interesting.

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DAY 3:

Click HERE to view the rest of Day 3's pictures.

Day 3 was Mt. Timna day, which is often considered to be the most brutal hike of the entire trip. We luckily had a rare breeze giving us some coolness on the tough hike. There were some points where we had to haul ourselves up pretty sheer cliffs by our upper body strength, and at the top we were climbing up on ladder rungs that jutted out from the rock.

We almost didn't make it up because one of the ladies in our group was struggling a lot in the heat, but she pushed through and it was amazing to reach the top of this mountain with all of my friends. RVL at the top called this mountain our version of Mt. Sinai, and described the events there as a wedding between God and his people. To obey the commandments is to show our love for him, and it's something that's a daily, conscious decision.

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DAY 4:

Click HERE to view the rest of Day 4's pictures.

We made our way to Ein Gedi for Day 4, and this was either my most favorite or second favorite day of the whole trip. (You'll see my other favorite day in a short bit.) There were streams of water and waterfalls in this area, and it was a drastic change from the dead heat of Mt. Timna the day before. We learned about living water and what it means to bring life to others in their desert times.

In the afternoon our hike was extremely hot and lacking any of the streams we'd seen in the morning, and people were starting to lose a lot of stamina. And then we found it: the hidden waterfall. All of us threw our backpacks to the side and just ran into the pool of cold, refreshing water, shoes and all. It was such a clear picture of what living water feels like when you need it most.

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DAY 5:

Click HERE to view the rest of Day 5's pictures.

Arad was a little village in the Negev region where we learned about Jewish familial structures and how serious of a responsibility the patriarch of the village had. They were the ones who were supposed to care for the others and make sure they had what they needed.

This is a picture from Masada, which is a flat plateau type of area where Herod had built one of his palaces. It was extremely elaborate in design, with even what was once a pool that had to be filled by hand by people climbing up and down the mountain many times.

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DAY 6:

Click HERE to view the rest of Day 6's pictures.

This is one of the views from Qumran, which was essentially the headquarters of the Essenes. They were the ones who isolated themselves in order to prepare the way for the Messiah, but because of their isolation, they never engaged the chaos of the world. At the top of Qumran, we wrote on stones how we were going to prepare the way in our own lives, and I chose to write an Emily Dickenson quote from a poem of hers that I love. (You can see it in the Day 6 album.)

Just outside of the Judah wilderness, we came to a sheep cave. There was a lot of poop, I'm not gonna lie, and it was definitely not what you'd call glamorous. And it's like the type of cave that Jesus would've been born in: gross, dark, and not at all what you'd think of as a king's birthplace.

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If you liked my little daily snippets from the trip in this post, fear not! I will be posting a part two of this coming up on Monday with Days 7 through 13 in it. I wanted to split it up just for the sake of having it all be more bite-sized information bits rather than a complete info dump, so hopefully you don't mind. (: I may also do a part three just so that I have somewhere to put my additional thoughts about the trip that don't include the hikes alone (like Israeli food, yum!), so stay tuned for that.

See you in part two!

That is all.

Cheers,