A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines.

From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights. 

We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have ascended to heaven to receive special revelations from God. It is also the site of Mount Moriah where Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac.

We prayed at the Wailing Wall below the Al Aqsa Mosque. The wall was part of the Jewish temple that used to stand there. It is where Jews go to pray. We also went underground there to see stones from the original temple wall.

We visited the gaudy Church of the Holy Sepulchre where tradition has it that Jesus died and was buried. We also visited a small hill outside the old city above a bus station which looks like it could be skullish, with a tomb nearby. Some claim that could have been the correct site of Jesus’ death and burial because the Bible called the place He died the place of the skull. 

We went to the Mount of Olives where Jesus prayed before his trial. We visited Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity where they say Jesus was born. We went to Tel Aviv on the coast; the Sea of Galilee in the north, where Jesus did much of his ministry and the Jordan River, which is rather unimpressive as rivers go. 

We visited the Dead Sea and En Gedi, an oasis of waterfalls and pools where David spent some time hiding from Saul. The Dead Sea is…a dead sea. It is fed by the Jordan River but has no outlet, so it just sits…and dies. Because it has a very large amount of salt, it is very buoyant when you get in. The shores of the Dead Sea are the lowest area of land on earth.

There is a spiritual illustration about the Dead Sea that my dad used to use. He would say that, like the Dead Sea, if we only have spiritual input into our lives and do not give out, we will die spiritually. I guess that could be true of many aspects of our lives.

An incident at the Dead Sea began a long-running family joke. En Gedi is within walking distance of the Dead Sea, so after floating around for a bit, we were walking over when I stepped on a thorn. I screamed and jumped around in pain. My alarmed dad raced over to see what was wrong. When I told him it was a thorn he said, 

“I thought at least half your foot had been cut off.” 

We used that line many times since.

From Israel, we went back to Greece and took a bus (or coach as they call them in Europe) to England. It took three days, driving day and night. The drivers played very annoying Greek music the whole time. Smoking was also allowed and we got saturated.

YWAM has a large manor house in the country south of London called Holmstead Manor where my dad was invited to speak. It was fun exploring the manor and grounds and from there we visited the sights in the city that was to later become my favorite place in the world to live – London.

When we were in London, there was a pretty good representation of punks hanging around the center of town with their spiked up, multi-colored hair. Of course, the punk sentiment is one of in-your-face rebellion but my father was very good at disarming and connecting with people. He went up to one of the punks with particularly long, spiked, colored hair and asked him how he got it to stand up like that. He even touched it. 

The guy seemed to be pretty proud of his hair so it totally disarmed him and my father began to engage him in conversation. He was just like that. We also went up north to visit some of my dad’s relatives before taking the three-day bus extravaganza back to Greece.