Posts tagged Israel

We are familee!!

As I reflect back on my trip to Israel I think about how perfectly God crafted our group. While I couldn’t see it in the beginning, God was forming a group of people that would become tightly knit, like-minded, and forever changed by an amazing journey.

I remember the very first meeting before the trip and as I looked at the people that would be coming I thought, wow this is quite a random group.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure that we would all mesh.

I counted a total of 4 people that I had spent time with outside of church. The rest I had either only seen in passing, had brief conversations with or I didn’t know at all. Our group comprised of singles, married couples, old(er) and young people.  It was a pretty diverse assemblage.

In our final meeting before leaving, we met together at the house of my pastor. It was there that something changed. Although most of us had not spent much time together, I could already see the connections beginning to form.  As we entered into a time of worship at the house, I realized that I was with a group that was totally committed to worshipping Jesus.  That’s when I realized that this was probably going to be good. Little did I know how good it would be!

As we arrived at the airport and began our long journey to the Holy Land, our team had already begun to gel. Rarely did a moment pass when we weren’t either talking about how awesome God is or laughing out loud at something silly. Even after being cramped into coach seats for 12 hours, we arrived in Israel in great spirits…though a bit jet lagged.

The next gift was our amazing tour guide. I remember the first thing that he said to us was, “My name is Salo and for the next days, you will be my family”.  How true that came to be! God blessed us with an amazing man that was completely in tune with the spirit of our team. His parents were raised in Poland and they emigrated to Venezuela when he was a boy. He was raised there and Spanish is his mother tongue so understandably we were a little baffled when our Jewish tour guide spoke to us in a heavy Spanish accent!

Over the course of the next 11 days, he led us on a prophetic journey through the wilderness of the Negev, the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem and the peace of Galilee. All the while, he brought the Bible alive through his narrative. Along the way he let the Spirit lead him to where we should sing or pray or just sit and meditate. It would go something like, “Maybe here…a few of us pray” or “Katherine, maybe you make a song.”  Then as we left a site, he would inevitably say “Okay family, we go!” It was awesome!

As the trip was drawing to a close, I felt such an intense connection with the entire team. There were 24 of us total. It makes me think of a phrase that A.W. Tozer used, “Fellowship of the Burning Hearts”. That’s truly what we were. Everywhere we went, we exalted Jesus. We were all invariably linked by our passion for worshipping the King! 

Before I left for the trip, I remember thinking to myself that I wished this person or that person would be on the trip and how much more fun or profound it would be with people I knew more intimately. In retrospect, I couldn’t have selected a more perfect group of people to share one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. 

I am forever changed and I come back with new perspective and more importantly…new familee!