I have enjoyed my two weeks in Jerusalem. We worked in a Jewish soup kitchen for almost a week, shared Shabbat with our host, and visited a synagogue where the education guide shared with us the kinds of things one will find in a synagogue and their symbolic meanings. We prayer walked through the Holy City, went to the Western (Wailing) Wall to pray, went to Holocaust Museum, the Garden of Gethsemane, and visited Mt. Olives where Jesus had supposedly ascended into Heaven and now where a mosque stands. 🙁 I didn’t know that 75% of Jerusalem was occupied by Muslims until the other day my team and I took a city tour. Last night when we went to Mt. Olives, we heard the Muslim call to prayer. At 5pm, the calls were made throughout the city of Jerusalem. It was eerie. And what made it more eerie was the fact that we were walking by the Mt. Olive cemetary. The whole west side of Mt. Olive has been defaced with whitetombs and gravesites, a place where burial lots cost a pretty shekel to reserve front row seats to see the Messiah’s second coming. That’s the craziest thing I heard so far on this trip, besides the story about the boy who tried to sell a man Goliath’s head and then the next day tried to sell the same man Goliath’s head when Goliath was a little boy! 🙂
Please keep Jerusalem in prayer. My heart has been for the Jews, Muslims, and Armeneans lately. I pray that they know Him as they are fully known. Sunday, my team leaves for another town in Israel. I am not sure exactly what city, but we may be working with the Beduines. I pray we do.
