Two Weeks in Israel

I made a few drawings in my sketchbook as we went along. They’re generally unfinished, but that’s how sketches are, moments in time, until time’s up.

We have just returned from Israel. It was a very full two weeks. The first was to build a playground with 30-some other volunteers temporarily serving “Kids Around the World,” an organization that does such. The second was a tour of Israel with the same group. There was so much to take in . . . some of it a review, now with “place” to connect it to; other was new information. It’s the kind of experience that one has to, well, experience. To try and explain it somehow diminishes it all.

A portion of us, sitting and listening to our guide at ancient Shiloh, moments before we got up and walked around . . . possibly on holy ground.

For the Israel tour we had the benefit of two guides, one a walking encyclopedia of historic, linguistic, cultural and biblical knowledge, the other more of a commenter on sometimes the political, sometimes the spiritual angle of things. We often got out to not-normally-visited places, like Shiloh, the setting for many Old Testament happenings and an early resting place for the Ark of the Covenant.

That’s Isaac on the right, our university-trained tour guide. On the left, my quick poem, penned right where Peter denied and a cock crowed. (Click drawings–maybe twice–for larger view.)

Sketch books, as I use them, are as much for words as for drawings. Sometimes it’s the jotting down of some momentary meditation, like the above, done while sitting briefly in the house of Caiaphas. That was one of the main mid-night venues of Jesus’s pre-crucifixion condemnation, right after Peter’s famous (predicted) denial in triplicate. The list that follows is of later notes jotted for any further recall or contemplation.

Such contemplations on some of these topics, or others, will be the subject of the next few blogs. It’s for my sake as well as anything, to capture them before they’re gone. As always, feel free to share.

Just in case you can’t read my small print, here’s the poem (or prayer):

Lord — It’s a comfort, tho a small one,
That like with Peter
You already know all about my denials.
Three times before breakfast
On any given day.
The worst, for Peter, was his boast
That he never would.
THAT, I won’t say.
But does that make me better?
Or worse?