Crawling Through a Cave

There was an unbelievable amount of “AWESOME” packed into our first full day!

Starting off with a hike in Gezer, we followed the footsteps of Joshua to a set of large “remembrance stones” erected in the Old Testament. We stopped there as Mike read passages from Joshua’s life and encouraged us with the thought that each generation has to experience God in a fresh way and as individuals we need to build our own memorials to Him in our lives.

From there we re-live the life of Samson as we overlooked Zorah. Again, we experienced where Scripture took place as we read his tale out of Judges. Samson is a lesson in how compromising our God given calling is not only destructive to us but to countless others as well. We took time to look out towards many of the areas where his Samson’s life took him and we took a few moments to pray and affirm out individual God-given callings. Our time there ended with a climb down into an ancient cistern where Mike reaffirmed us through the words of Jeremiah that the Lord is our “living water.”

Lastly, we experienced key events in the life of David. We hiked up to where the Philistine’s camp was in 1 Samuel 17 and we overlooked the Valley of Elah, where David and Goliath faced off. We even got to head down to the stream where David has selected his 5 smooth stones for battle and picked up a stone or two of our own. You never know when we’ll run into another vicious giant, right?

From there, it was off to Adullam to explore the caves David used to hide from Saul murderous jealousy. This was the highlight of my day because we were given the opportunity to literally crawl on our hands and knees through an incredibly narrow cave that David had taken refuge in. It was tough for the 30 minutes it took to get through, so it’s mind blowing to think that David and his men would at one point call those caves “home” for an extended period.

We ended our day by heading to the Dead Sea and that’s where we’ll pick up our adventure tomorrow. See you then!

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