In Israel there are lush green fields of grain and barley, but there are also desolate wastelands - brown and dry. But they are both the Promised Land. Come summer 2003 God said, "It's time to go into the desert."
Such a different cry came from my heart than the previous summer. I could not wait to go home in 2002; I pleaded with God not to make me go home in 2003. I had nearly filled out an application to be a summer counselor at Bethel Bible Camp as a good Christian excuse to avoid my fears. God had other plans. The next day I was called by my former youth pastor at the Jaars center. What he asked me struck fear into my heart. "Hey Steve, what would you think of being a summer intern with the youth group?"
What did I think? I thought it was a horrible idea. I did not want to go home, I wanted to go to Bethel Bible Camp. So I declined his offer. "Take a week to pray about it," he asked.
Convinced that no amount of prayer would change my mind, I took his advice. It took only one day of prayer for the Lord to steer my heart, which has nothing to do with the mind. My heart directed me into that Dark Valley with my mind protesting the whole way. That Dark Valley was the very tear that God had caused in my life only months before. How dark it was, but there would be no running this time. Three things held me fast: one, the intense compassion the Lord had given me for the kids at Jaars; two, the support of friends and family members (whom I am sure have no idea what they have done for me); and three, God's constant answer to my desperate prayers. "If you knew now what I have in store for you, then you would be overjoyed." The words of a song I heard once come to mind, "There is a light that shines in the darkness, his name is Jesus. His name is Jesus."
That was the hardest summer so far in my lifetime ending only one month ago. But that joy that my Lord spoke of before abounds within me to a degree that at times I find it hard to breath. He has brought me through the Valley by miraculous acts of faithfulness, which I am sure some athiest somewhere would label coincidence. No, God is the Prince of coincidence as I learned in elementary school. "He's got the whole world in his hands." Now I know this much more so.
August 27th my grandmother drove me to the Charlotte Douglass International Airport. I would not be here without all her help. My plane to Newark was to depart at 7:30, so after purchasing some travelor's checks at the bank we got to the airport at 5:00. Upon getting to the desk to check my luggage I was informed that there was an earlier flight to Newark allowing me a longer layover before flying to Tel Aviv. It would depart at 5:25. Let me know when someone breaks my record of fifteen minutes from checking my bags to boarding the plane.
Before I could ponder that I was leaving home for a long, long time I was 35,000 feet up and hundreds of miles away.
In Tel Aviv I took a sherut to Jerusalem receiving my introduction to Hebrew culture: two Jerusalem-bound sherut drivers screaming bloody-murder at eachother for fifteen minutes about whom I should ride with. Finally they stopped, and during the hour trip it finally hit me that I was in Israel. This is what that long journey, which I had set out on two and a half years earlier, had prepared me for. Each step blind, weak and faithless, like a thirst-crazed abandoner stumbling in the desert. Indeed I had been through a desert of my own as it seems everyone must go through a desert of some sort to get here just like the Israelites who were lost for forty years. Israel is a land of mountains, grasslands, farms, deserts, streams, rivers, and a sea of salt. I asked a friend here how God even imagined a place like this, much less built it. A human question for sure. He answered, "This is the Promised Land, what else can you expect."
