I Love to See the Temple... and Jordan!

This is the street that is right next to the temple wall, which is part of an archeological park. The stones that are fallen here are the ones that used to be part of the Second Temple (the one that Herod the Great built, that was there when Jesus was), that the Romans destroyed. Following the prophecy of Jesus, they didn't leave any stone left on top of another! They pushed them all off of the Temple Mount! Here is the dramatic proof.

This is a stone that for sure Jesus walked on. It is right outside of the double entrance to the temple, that was especially used during feast days (all males of the House of Israel had to present themselves at the temple during three annual feasts). Lance Armstrong stood here and said that it meant more to him than standing on the moon. After going to several places that are "likely sites," "competing sites," or "within a few hundred yards of the real site," it was cool to go to a place that for sure Jesus went. To stand somewhere where for sure Jesus stood. Yet, I've learned here that the Spirit is to be felt while pondering, reading scriptures, and praying, not in the sites themselves.
Here are the steps leading up to the stone where the previous picture was taken.

This is the "Souk," or market place here in West Jerusalem. It has tons of fun shops that sell nuts, dried fruits, spices, scarves, dreidels, and tons of other stuff. It's fun to be there!

And now for our 4-day field trip to JORDAN! Jordan is a kingdom, with a royal family and all. There are pictures of the king everywhere. The main industry in the country is tourism, so they love foreigners and are really kind to us. I felt a prevailing happiness there among the people. They seemed chill and content with their lives. The two biggest tourist/history spots are: Petra and Jerash.

This is Eden, me, and Josett after experiencing a Turkish bath! This is a common touristy thing to do while in Jordan, and it was amazing! You sit in a sauna, you get scrubbed (and shown the dead skin that came off), washed, and massaged. You come out feeling like a new person! It was super relaxing, once I got over the awkwardness of it. It was quite an experience!

Petra! This ancient city pre-dates the Romans, and was built by the Nabateans. They had a huge, huge settlement here. Petra is the spiritual center (full of tombs and stuff), and there were two different locations that were the residential center and marketplace. To enter Petra you walk for about 30 minutes through two towering rock faces. The geology was absolutely stunning. I loved it. The sandstone is more colors than I knew rocks could be, and they were all swirled together like the rainbowy surface of a bubble! Awesome!

Me in front of the Treasury! This is the famous tomb that was used in Indiana Jones as the location of the Holy Grail! It was stunning to emerge from the path between the cliffs and see this at the end.

After hiking all over Petra, I decided in my free time to climb up to the "High Place," where they used to sacrifice animals to their gods. It was probably a mistake, as I nearly got heat exhaustion (having drank all my water), but it was a cool view! Look at all the crazy tombs beneath me. I'm pretty high up!

And those are all the pictures I've decided to include from Jordan, but we also visited Jerash, which is the best well preserved Greek-Roman city outside of Greece/Rome. It was also cool.



This is Cave 4 of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We went here on the hottest day of the year. I was about to throw up from heat exhaustion on this day, too, so I got a glimpse, took a picture, and went in search of air conditioning. I got to see the Dead Sea Scrolls at two places, Jordan and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Jordan let me take pictures of 'em, which was cool!

What I don't have a picture of yet, because it wasn't taken with my camera, is me floating in the Dead Sea, which also happened on this field trip! It was pretty crazy! They told us this story of a fat man who got flipped over onto his stomach and couldn't flip back over and he died. I can totally understand why, though--you're so buoyant that it's almost hard to move! It was a struggle to stand straight in the water when I wanted. It was really fun to bounce in the water (it's crazy to bounce in water when you can't even touch the ground). It was painful, though, hot-searingly painful. You don't even know the tiny cuts you have on your body until you enter that intense concentration of salt water! We found some mud on the shore and coated our bodies in it, even though it smelled like sulfur, because it's supposed to be great for your skin. I don't know that sulfur-mud is great for skin, but I know that my skin was baby soft when I came out! Whether it was from the oily water or the mud, I don't know, but it was fun!


This is me in front of a 1:50 scale model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple period, at about 60 AD. See how tall the temple is compared to me! It was super cool! This is just outside the Israel Museum (which was fabulous and huge), right by the Shrine of the Book. My favorite part of the whole thing was this model!

Cool church and Christmas in July!

Hi Guys! Today is August 11th, and I leave Jerusalem in less than 5 hours (at 3 am!), so in light of that time, I'm going to attempt to catch up on the past 21 days since I last wrote! Ack! Well, Here is me at the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene. It's the only Christian church with gold domes, and it looks really cool. :)

This is me at Shepherds Fields, overlooking Bethlehem. We had an hour of pondering time here, and then we had a Christmas program in July! It was great!
This was our Christmas program! All of our angels are wearing their sheets. I especially like the two that are also wearing sunglasses! It was great to sing Christmas songs and look out over the mount that has the Church of the Nativity, imagining the star shining right above. This is where the shepherds were. This is where the angel appeared to them. This is where they decided to go seek the Savior. It was awesome. I learned in my classes that it is likely that they were Levite shepherds, raising lambs to be sacrificed in the temple (symbolic of Christ). It was probably the birthing time of the ewes, which is why the older men would be there and not just the young teenager shepherds. How cool, that these shepherds, who had been looking forward to the Messiah their whole lives, were the recipients of the angelic messengers that announced his birth!

Goliath, Elvis, and John the Baptist

Yesterday I got to go on a field trip to the tel of Gath, where Goliath was from. There is an archaeological dig going on, and we got to see them at work! It kind of made me want to come back as a volunteer archaeologist some summer. That'd be so cool! Then I went to a bunker and trench left over from the 1948 war of Independence, a diner dedicated to Elvis (random! but cool!), the church commemorating the road to Emmaeus (the resurrected Christ walked with two of his apostles and they didn't realize it until he disappeared), the church commemorating the birth of John the Baptist, the church commemorating the joyous meeting of Mary and Elisabeth, and a monastery. The monastery was built off of a very interesting idea: tradition has it that when the three angels visited Abraham, it was actually the Trinity, and they have him three staffs. Abraham's nephew Lot was distraught over how his two daughters had gotten him drunk and slept with him, making him the unwilling victim of incest. Lot wanted to know if he was forgiven. So Abraham gave him the three staffs he'd received, and told him to plant them and water them with water from the Jordan. If they sprouted, then he'd been forgiven. Lot does this and they sprout into a single tree that is simultaneously cyprus, pine, and cedar. Fast forward 2,000 years, and this tree is the one that is cut down (the Romans thought it was a cursed tree and thus fitting for Jesus' cross) and used to make the cross of Jesus. So this monastery is built over the spot where the tree was. Quite a story! It was a very interesting day. :)

Preamble to Galilee

I had some difficulty putting the text I wanted to above my last picture, so here it is as a separate post. :)

My 10 day excursion in Galilee was fabulous. We stayed in a kibbutz resort (a kibbutz is a collectivist group of Jews that live and work together) on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and had field trips every other day. We saw Old Testament sites, New Testament sites, Jewish history sites, and other random stuff. It was awesome! I loved it. I loved the beauty of the land and the connection that I felt to Christ. The birds that I heard chirping in the morning were the same sounds He would have heard. The sun setting over the hills is the same site He would have seen. Also, a lot of the ruins were amazingly preserved (certain cities were cursed, and thus never built up again), so I could stand in the synagogues where Jesus preached. Absolutely amazing. I'm going to post pictures of about 80% of the sites I visited. My two favorite places were the Mount of Beatitudes and the Church at Nain.

Today I swam where Jesus walked: GALILEE TRIP!

This is me in the theater at Caesarea Maritima. It was a big Roman city dedicated to Caesar. The weather was just like San Diego, and it made me excited. We saw the remains of the fortress and even saw the room where Paul was held for 2 years. At the end of that time he gave his famous speech and made his accuser say "almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."

This is the synagogue church at Nazareth. We went to several churches here, but this was my favorite. It is the synagogue that Jesus came back to preach in. He declared that he was the son of God, but the people rejected him, saying "isn't this Joseph's son?" and wanted to stone him.

Me in a baklava shop. :)

Me on the boat ride across the Sea of Galilee. It was cool to think of all the things that happened on this sea. Jesus walked on water. Peter walked and then started sinking. Jesus calmed the tempest. Jesus taught from the boat, pulled out a little bit from the shore. Jesus told Peter to put down his nets one more time and then they pulled up enough fish to fill two boats (this was right before calling them to follow him, and this miracle was an act of mercy to provide for their families while the husbands were gone. There was a salting place not far, and the fish could be salted and then used for food and to sell for other things while the apostles were off following Jesus. Isn't that awesome?). And this is where Jesus told one of the apostles to go fish and he'd find a fish with a coin in its mouth to pay his taxes. Lots of awesome things for one sea!

This is the church commemorating the Sermon on the Mount. This whole place is called the mount of Beattitudes. I LOVED being here. It overlooks the Sea of Galilee, it's beautiful, and the sermon itself is beautiful. I loved listening to lecture here, but the best part was the 30 minutes we got to read/ponder alone by ourselves. I read over the Sermon on the Mount and wrote down impressions and insights. I am struck by the whole thing. It embodies what is means to be Christian. I want to follow what Jesus says in this Sermon. I want to have these Christian virtues. It's amazing that Christ embodied these attributes so well.

This is the church commemorating the miracle of multiplying the bread and fishes to feed the 5,000. I believe it's called Tagbha. This was one of Jesus' most impressive miracles. The bread was symbolic of manna, and proved that Jesus was the God of the Old Testament who fed them with bread in the wilderness. It was also a response to Satan's temptation to turn the stone into bread (Dr. Brown says that Jesus responded to the temptations in deed afterward, in his ministry), showing that he indeed had the power.

The synagogue at Capernaum. Jesus would have preached here a lot. If I remember right, this is where Jesus taught them that he was the Bread of Life. Capernaum was like Jesus' adopted home. He always returned there. Peter lived here with his wife and mother-in-law, and healing his mother-in-law was one of Jesus' first miracles. Peter's house became the first Christian "church." The remains of his house are still there!

This is Bethsaida, where Peter, Andrew, and Philip are from! This is one of the cities that Jesus did a lot of preaching and healing in, and then he cursed it for their unbelief. We are standing on the street where Peter would have walked!

This is Gamla, it was a Jewish city that first sided with the Romans, then decided to rebel, and then was squashed by the Romans. They killed 4,000 of the inhabitants and forced the other 5,000 to jump off the cliff to their deaths. It's named Gamla because it looks like a camel's back (I forget why that connects, but it does). It was a cool hike! And they had an awesome synagogue.
Eden and I grinding wheat! This is at Qazrin, which was a 5th Century Jewish city. It has some houses restored to look like how they would during that time, with all the artifacts that a house would have. Our religion teacher read us the scripture about how two women would be grinding at the mill and one would be taken and the other would be left. So here's an example of a two-person grinder!

This is a mine field! Don't worry, Mom, I didn't hop the fence. This land was involved in the war between Syria and Israel for the Golan Heights. They didn't say, but I'm guessing it was from the 1967 war. More explanation below.

This is Aubrey, Eden, and I in a Syrian bunker! This is in the Golan Heights, which used to belong to Syria. We saw a war memorial. We also went to this area where we could see the border with Syria and the UN station in between, keeping the peace. Syria still wants all of the Golan Heights.

This is Kursi (it's called something else in the scriptures though). It's where Christ cast the devils out of the man and they asked to go into the pigs and then they ran down and drown themselves in the Sea of Galilee. This is the hill the pigs ran down! Crazy, huh? Apparently this was a gentile city, and it was the only time Jesus attempted to work among them. The man he healed wanted to go with Jesus, but he told him to stay and share his testimony with anyone who'd listen. Years later when the apostles received the revelation to take the gospel to the gentiles, the people of this city surely were prepared to hear the word!

This is Bet Shan. The mound behind me is the "tel" of the Old Testament city (this is where Saul and Jonathan's bodies were hung on the city walls). I'm standing in the cardo of the Roman-era city. I almost felt like I had been to Europe!

This is me in front of the church at Nain that commemorates the miracle of Jesus raising the widow's son from the dead. I didn't expect it to be a way cool experience, but it ended up being amazing. Our teacher talked about how Nain is 25 miles away from Capernaum, where Jesus was the previous day, which means that Jesus would have had to walk through the night to get there in time to raise the widow's son from the dead while the funeral procession was going out. I learned what a desperate situation this was for the widow. Property goes from father to son, so since her husband had already died, if her only son died too, all their property would be returned to her husband's family. She in turn would only be given her dowry back, which was probably a humble one. Then she would be at the mercy of her family members for subsistence. And Jesus knew her. He knew her situation and he had compassion. This was one of the few miracles that he just did. He wasn't asked to do it, there was no preamble before performing it, he just walked up and did it. Absolutely magnificent. It was one of three times that he raised someone from the dead (see Lazarus and Jairus' 12 year old daughter), yet we never talk about it. My religion teacher said that he thinks the single mothers of today are like the widows of Jesus' day. They are in similar destitute situations. It made me think of my parents' example in taking care of the single mothers in our congregation. My dad has been amazing at showing compassion and anticipating needs of these women, serving them even when it wasn't convenient. I feel in awe at his example, and I am grateful to have been born to parents who are so Christlike and service-oriented.

This is Mount Tabor, a possible site of the transfiguration. There is a church commemorating the transfiguration on top of it.

Here I am looking over the Jezreel Valley. It is named for Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, who brought the entire kingdom of Israel down into idolatry. The Jezreel Valley will be the site of Armageddon. But it'll be on the other side of the valley, by the ancient city of Megiddo (Armageddon comes from "Har Megiddo" or mountain of Megiddo). It's a gigantic fertile valley, and it's interesting to picture a huge battle going on here.

This is Dan, which is the land allotted to the tribe of Dan in the north. When the kingdom split, Jeroboam didn't want his subjects to have to go down to Judah to Jerusalem to worship (knowing that would weaken his power), so he built two golden calves and put them in Dan and Bethel. This is the temple he built. It had a huge altar, then the steps leading up to the temple, and inside the Holy of Holies was the golden calf. Thus, the beginning of the downfall of Israel! I really liked going to Dan. It was cool to see the headwaters of the Jordan river, too. They seem to just flow out from underneath rocks, randomly! It was awesome. And beautiful.

This is the old city gate, which Abraham would have passed through in order to rescue Lot. Cool!

This is Caesarea Philippi, also known as Banias (coming from Pan, who is a Pagan god). This was a place where they worshipped Pan and other pagan gods, so it's kind of cool to know that background because this is the spot where Jesus asked Peter what other people thought of him and then "whom do you say that I am?" After Peter answered, Jesus said that Peter knew his identity because the Holy Ghost revealed it to him, and said that he would build his church "upon this rock"--interestingly, there is a huge rock cliff face in this place!

This is Nimrod's Castle, a Crusader castle that guarded the whole valley beneath it. It was SUPER cool to explore. Lots of secret passageways. I got to crawl into the tower. There were a bunch of bats in this one place, and they looked gross.

This is the synagogue at Chorazim, one of three cities Jesus cursed. The scriptures only talk about it in that one verse, but apparently most of Jesus' ministry was spent in those three cities, so he must have spent a lot of time preaching here. This is the original synagogue! Cool!!!!

Sunset at the Sea of Galilee.

Reading my scriptures by the shore. This was my favorite past time. It's so peaceful and beautiful.

Celebrating American Independence in Jerusalem!

Hi Guys! Sorry I've been missing in action for a while--last week was finals week here, and it was way intense! I escaped to the city just twice--one day I went to the Sisters of Zion convent and another day I went to St. George Cathedral, roman ruins underneath Damascus Gate, and walking on the rooftops of the Jewish Quarter. They were cool, and very needed escapes!

Today was our free day, and we thought it'd be very appropriate to celebrate our independence day by going to the Kinesset (Israel's parliament). However, we didn't make it. We ended up seeing a lot of other cool stuff though! We went to the Underground Prisoner's Museum (where the British kept the resistance fighters during the British Mandate period), an very colorful Ethiopian Church (I heard they use drums in their services, so I really want to see one!), a museum full of the paintings of this guy who painted all of the Psalms (symbolically of course. He's a Jewish mystic. And his paintings were pretty rad!), the Ticho House (a rich Arab house from a hundred years ago that now has art displays inside), and walked down Mea Sherim (the main street of an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood).

The Center had an awesome Fourth of July party! We had a barbeque and potato salad for dinner and apple pie, brownies, and ice cream for dessert! It was so good! We had awesome streamers and decorations and a little ceremony with singing patriotic songs. Afterward I did face painting! It was cool because I remembered back to last year when I set up my free face painting stand at the Fourth of July Parade in Provo. :) There was also bobbing for apples and sparklers. Hooray for Fourth of July in Israel!

Passover in June!

Mike holding our bottle of pseudo-wine (fancy grape juice) :)

Nick, Aubrey, Courtney, Me, and Tiff

Hello again! Last night we had our mock Passover dinner, and it was wonderful. I went to a Passover dinner held by the Religion Department at BYU probably 3 years ago, but this one was even better.

It was hosted by our Judaism professor, who brought his 4 year old daughter as a guest--so cute. It was really cool, because he himself is an orthodox Jew, and sang portions of the service in Hebrew for us. A week ago he also coached different groups of us in singing various Hebrew songs, so that we could participate in the service. Way cool! I sang the song at the end of the dinner with 6 other girls. So there's about an hour and a half of reviewing the history of the exodus (10 plagues, etc.), praising God, and rituals before dinner. This is when we take the parsley leaf (a symbol of spring/rebirth) and dip it in salt water (a symbol of tears), eat the bitter herbs (for the trials they passed), look at the lamb bone (representing the lamb blood over the doors), etc. We also have two ritual cups of wine before dinner--we had this really awesome grape juice that is bottled here and it tasted way different than any other grape juice I've ever had--and two glasses after dinner. Then after the rituals and singing, we eat a big dinner (fried fish, THEN the soup, then the salad, then the meal, then fruit, then dessert---huge!). Then we have the redeeming of the matzah bread (matzah is unleavened bread symbolizing the haste with which the people fled Egypt), and one last song, which was a rap--this is a fun song that can be song in any style, and whose purpose is to keep the children interested. We had 6 students make it into a rap, and it was awesome. I will try to upload the video I took of it later at night when it's ok that I use the entire building's bandwidth. :)

Now I'll describe my favorite part: the symbolism of the matzah. We didn't talk about this during our Passover, but my friend told me about it before, and it is soooo cool! So, at the beginning of the ritual, the head of the house puts three loaves of matzah inside a cloth, symbolizing the Godhead. He takes the middle piece of matzah (Christ) and breaks it in half. The larger of the two halves he puts inside a different cloth. It is needed to conclude the Passover--you can't end without that piece of matzah, so it is very important that it doesn't disappear. ...but it always does. When I was at the religion department's Passover, we just passed it around under the table throughout the whole dinner. Last night someone hid it somewhere in the building. At the end of the dinner when we need the matzah in order to end, the head of the house offers a price to "redeem" the matzah (note symbolism of the atonement--so cool!). Generally the person who has the matzah names his price, but last night our professor just offered something--chocolate--outright for it. After he redeems the matzah, they eat it as the last thing in the Passover dinner (this is after dessert). And this is the best part! THIS is the bread that Jesus likely broke and gave to his apostles as the very first sacrament of the Lord's Supper!!! It's a symbol of himself, that he already paid the price for, which redeems us. The Atonement.

I love symbolism. I think it's so cool. And I love Jesus. I know that He lived and died for us, so that we could become clean to live with Him again.