In my first two weeks in Israel, mostly because of safety factors, I felt like my service here has been very minimal. I have learned, however, in times where I don’t feel like I’m very useful to make a point to pray for my friends back home, buy a treat for one of my teammates here or simply read the Bible (of which, I’ve read an embarrasingly small amount of).
This past Friday, I met and spent 24 hours with a young woman, Sally, from Israel. She actually knew one of my squad leaders from his original World Race and lived only minutes from where we happened to be staying in a remote village.
We were invited with a few other people to their friday night Shabatt, which is a traditional Jewish meal they use to celebrate the sabbath. I’m not sure of all of the details and traditions of this meal or the Sabbath, but there were at least ten different ‘appetizers’ set before us preceding the meal, all prepared by the mother of this woman. Then they brought out two main dishes, soup to finish the meal, then fruit, pastries and coffee as dessert. Enough to feed most world-racers for a week:)
This was a very rare moment where I got to go into the home of this culturally Jewish family. Through our conversation that followed this amazing meal, I began to realize just how deeply religion is rooted in the culture of the Israeli’s. How much religion keeps them apart (even though they don’t seem to really believe). I also realized how difficult it is for them to understand the difference between culturally Christian and having a relationship with God through Christ. This is an idea that is so strange to them (and to a lot of Americans as well), I didn’t know how to explain it. Even though I did a few times, they still seemed to be stuck on the word ‘Christian’ meaning something totally different than what we are trying to represent.
Ashlee and I ended up getting invited to spend the night in their guest house. The house had two bedrooms with double beds, nice shower, kitchen and a living room. Even though neither of us had a room to ourselves in over three months, we chose to share one double bed. I suppose it just felt weird to sleep that far from another person after being in such close quarters for so long.
The next morning we woke up to clean towels, showers, coffee and breakfast. We took a walk with Sally and got to know more about her and her family. We then were invited to just hang out on the couch and watch movies until the rest of our group got there for another traditional meal that afternoon. We stayed and talked for a long time and then had to get back to the place where we were serving.
Despite the ‘religious’ conversation that seemed to take us nowhere, it’s a small world at the very least that this all happened. That the same woman my squad leader met on his first world race in Central America happened to live so close to the place we were serving this month with him as our leader. It was a glimpse into the world of Israel that most of us haven’t gotten to see and I’m so glad I got this chance.
