travel update: israel return
I returned home from Israel on August 4 and I've barely had time to stop and process what just happened. I'm still processing, so I'll ask for some grace.
People want to hear about my time in Israel and what I learned, and I think that they want to hear stories about washing my feet in the Jordan River where my Lord was baptized, or walking up the Southern Steps while reading the Psalms of Ascent, or sitting on the coast of the Sea of Galilee where Peter was redeemed by Jesus and charged with the shepherding of the church. And I have those stories, I have lots of those stories, moments that are becoming even more real as I flip through the Scriptures and can now picture the Judean Desert where Jesus was tempted or the sheer height of Mount Precipice where He was almost thrown to His death.
But the stories that are moving me most right now are the stories of the recent Middle Eastern people, the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Syrians. These people and their history rocked me. I walked into this trip with little to no knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but -- equally dangerously -- I came with the Western mindset that all problems have solutions. There might be radical compromise on both sides, there might be a creative solution that requires a lose-lose for a win-win, but there's always a solution that will create a blank slate on which to start the next chapter of history.
My country is 241 years old. That part of the Earth has history dating back ten times that. There is no blank slate here. There is no solution for either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that doesn't require total surrender on one of the sides. And that, frankly, is not going to ever happen without the hand of God. There are terrorism charges on both sides. There's racism on both sides. There's anger and hope and fear and beauty on both sides, because both sides are comprised of people beloved by God. And I don't know what to do with that.
I was most moved in this regard by our visit to the Gaza Strip. We stood in the beating sun, squinting to see the thin barbed wire fence less than a mile away that separated Gaza from Israel, listening to our tour guide explain to us the occupation of Hamas upon the Gaza people. He's talking about the rockets that are launched into Israel, and the rockets that are launched right back, and the tunnels under the fence into Israel territory, and the manipulation of the education system to destroy hope and promote hate. And while I'm processing that Gaza is the most rapidly growing population in the world with firm borders they cannot cross, I recognize that I'm standing in rocket territory, and the cement building with colorful paintings on it that I'm leaning against is a bomb shelter that I might have to use should I hear the "red-alert code" siren.
And it all becomes incredibly real for me. This is no longer a problem that happens 2,000 miles and 7 times zones away. This is the home of Shai and his wife and his two daughters. This is the kibbutz, an agricultural commune, with almost a thousand Israeli people who live within a mile -- fifteen seconds by rocket -- of the border.
Someone asked the obvious question -- why, oh why, do you stay here? Our guide in the kibbutz answered that this is his home, and why, oh why, would he leave? Another answered, "If we leave and let them press us further in, peace will never win."
I don't know how to hold these things. I don't know how to look at Gaza and at the Sea of Galilee at the same time, or the Southern Steps and also the Wailing Wall. I don't know how, sometimes, if I'm honest, to trust that God is doing a good thing here. All I can do right now is stand in the kibbutz and echo the miraculous mindset of those who live there, in danger: "When it rains here, it rains there, too."
These are people in tension and in crisis, not ideas. Let us not forget that.
