Day 1

Now that I have found the free internet, I will take the opportunity to post some information about my trip on this site. Not everyone stops by this site, so if you get the chance, please let anyone who might be interested know there’s fresh data here.

We left rainy Pennsylvania on Tuesday to head to Scranton where we caught a bus to JKF. While it was rainy in Pennsylvania, it was even worse, weather-wise, in New York. Sometimes when you’re leaving on a journey like this it’s hard to leave the familiar, but weather like this makes it easier to say goodbye to your native land.

When we landed in Israel we hit the ground running – literally. After being processed, we got onto the bus where our “first water is free.” We headed off immediately to our first stop – the “traditional site” of the home of Simon the Tanner, where Peter enters a trance and receives his revelation concerning not calling “unclean” what God has called “clean.” I brought a devotional message called, “Hidden Realities,” concerning our need not to miss the spiritual significance of the events that had taken place here. Our Jewish guide, Doran, made a good point concerning Peter’s vision: “So what did he do? He got up and made himself a ham sandwich, right? No – Peter was a Kosher Jew, he never had a ham sandwich in his life! Peter went to the house of Cornelius. The point of the vision wasn’t dietary, it was the opening of the door for the Gentiles!” I’d never thought about that before. While Jesus did declare all foods clean, his point in this context for Peter was that he needed to be willing to go to the house of one who was unclean, Cornelius, and to willingly eat with him. The food might have been clean or unclean; the point was that Jesus wanted Peter to reach people who didn’t belong to him.

From there we went to Caesarea by the Sea and saw the Aqueduct and the Theater along the Mediterranean Sea.  The view of the sea was amazing. We read some Scripture and headed in for supper at our kibbutz, arriving at about 8 p.m., exhausted. The food was great, fish and lamb, the inevitable pickles, and a vast array of vegetables.

I headed off to a long-over-due shower and went to bed. 6 a.m. would arrive too soon.

I don’t even have time to proofread this. Edit the typos out in your head, please!