Life is Fluid

Day 2 AUDIO Israel Blog - Rachel and Jessica

http://gtitours.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Day-2-AUDIO-Israel-Blog-Rachel-and-Jessica.mp3

Life is fluid.  Will we stand firm when our faith is tested?

Day two in Israel prompted lot of internal reflection on the steadfastness of our faithfulness to God.  We’ve all experienced moments where our faith has been tested.  How did it turn out?  Did we succeed?  Did we stand firm?  Personally, I have many more failure stories than I do success stories.

The first stop of our travels took us to the Wilderness of Zin, a desert land known as the Tzi’ya.  This is a barren land that holds water only in limited places and only for a limited time each year.  It was here that the Israelites were on the “home stretch” of their trek to Canaan from Egypt, until of course their faith was tested and they failed to seize God’s promise, leading to an additional 40 years of wandering in the desert to shed a generation of disobedience.  It was here today, in a deep canyon of stone, that we found a small congregation of trees growing out of a sloping side of the rock next to a trickling spring of water.  We took rest in their shade and Brad led us as we read the first Psalm.  In our discussion of the passage we focused on the verses that referred to the tree “firmly planted by streams of water” whose leaf never withers and who always prospers.  The passage refers to a righteous man whose “delight is in the law of the Lord”.  As we looked at the trees beside us we could see their roots reaching down the slope and toward the source of life, not because they thirst today, but instead because God has seemingly embedded in them an understanding that life, as Brad said today, is fluid.  It’s unpredictable.  And though there was water today, it was only a trickle, and soon it would be gone for months at a time.

The tree is preparing itself to do life during the challenging times ahead and yet remain firmly planted.

We went next to the city of Arad where we found a temple that was built during the time of Solomon to be a place of worship for those who did not want to make the trip to Jerusalem.  It was built for Yaweh and was a 1/5 scale replica of the first Jerusalem temple.  There was one troubling addition however: a second incense pillar, made likely for the worship of Asherah, the Canaanite goddess of fertility.  Since its origin Arad had been a Canaanite city.  But when the Israelites took the city they didn’t do away with the pagan culture, but instead adopted part of it.  In doing so they compromised their faith, rejected God in the process, and became an unfaithful people.

So how do we fit into this?  It’s probably already quite clear.

Like the tree we need to prepare ourselves for the trying times by nourishing ourselves with God’s Word and meditating on it day and night so that we’ll also remain firmly planted when the climate of life changes.

We need to be 100% submitted to God, there’s simply no other way.  Anything other than being obedient is quite simply being disobedient, and disobedience is rejection of God’s will.  We cannot compromise our faith for friends or for our own individual gratification.

And finally, in the testing times we need to take refuge in God’s faithfulness.  We need to remove our hope in all other things and place it solely in him because one day all of those other things will be gone, but the Word of God remains.

We may find ourselves in the Tzi’ya of life.  But even in those seemingly barren moments our God will always be the God of just enough.  He will always sustain us.  Until then let’s be nourished by his Word.  Let’s be faithful, knowing that God is always faithful to us.  Let’s stay on course to seize his beautiful promise.

By Olen Budke

These are loose strands of a tapestry being woven into my life this 2^nd day of our pilgrimage through our spiritual ancestral home.

Our guide, Rownen, began to guide us along the banks of the Dead Sea with a reminder that we were on the King’s Highway which brought reminders of an old Sunday School song I used to sing as a child in my home church. In those days, we admonished ourselves thus to walk every day of our lives. That call was renewed in the first hours of our morning journey.

The story of tragic Sodom was refreshed in our minds as we searched with futility for remnants of Lot’s wife who could not resist looking back on a city under judgment and destruction. It was a city where the main business was business. As a result, the community values and regard for God’s call to a life of communal responsibility and obedient trust in the God Abraham had come to know held little currency. Their degradation was certain and systematic. Their destruction was final.

It was so utterly destroyed that no clues to its whereabouts remains.

Moving toward the Negev, we traveled from desert to desert.  We reflected upon the levels of the desert, the life of the Bedouin, The role of Beersheba in the sacred history of Abraham’s life and the long walks of our spiritual ancestors from well to well.

Places of water, shelter, food, safety, and care for livestock would naturally emerge a day’s travel from each other. These places of shelter would sometimes grow into villages, then towns, and then cities, about 26 miles apart.

From the Dead Sea to the coast was no straightforward trek.

A field of cactus prompted a story of modern Israel and the determined genius of the founders of the modern state. They created a nation of sabra (cactus people), prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside, who value democracy, community, innovation, problem solving, and the accomplishment of impossible dreams.

It was good to hear this fascinating man’s story, the story of his family, and his take on the history of his people.

Rain is rare in the area around Ein Avdat, not that it is plentiful anywhere in Israel. Water factored into every decision ancient peoples made and the movement of the patriarchs and the children of Israel during the Exodus.

At the base of the Wilderness of Zin, we experienced, not only some long walks, the taste of salt plants, and the value of flint stone, we became immersed in what it must have been like to be thirsty and complaining in the desert and come to a rock from which God caused water to flow.

Millions of souls were refreshed in a day.

Late last year, flash floods had overwhelmed the very canyon we were in and even today, we saw water coming from the rock.

There are many hard places in our lives, but hard places are not devoid of hope.

It is in the hard places where hope and faith are tested, but that testing is often a refinement.

We walked … up … way up. It was steep, jagged, and relentless and we walked and kept walking and found a tree planted by the water where we could reflect upon the daily discipline and promise of Psalm 1. Brad’s reflection was especially poignant. We need to store up water for our souls during the flash floods of grace in our life for the months and years of drought that may follow and the crises that are sure to emerge when we least expect them.

That is what the tree does and we are given the tree as a reminder of how we are to live, constantly drinking from God’s Word and being fed on the things of His Spirit.

We climbed more. I thought, and I panted a bit, that however I met my death, I’d like to be remembered as the mountaineers who were said to have died climbing.

“He died climbing” would not be a bad epitaph.

The pastor-leaders of this trek that I will call Moses, Joshua, and Aaron, or just Brad, Mike, and Rick, led us through the wilderness and we reflected upon, imagined, and related to those days of the Exodus.

“He is the God of Justenough.”

“There are seasons in our lives.”

“Knowing God is an intimate experience of God.”

We come to know God in the hard places where we learn to trust Him and to recognize Him. We discover Him to be faithful, abundant, and abounding in covenant love.

As we emerged from our wilderness wandering, the camels awaited us and brought us to a simulated Bedouin camp where we considered a culture of family, community, and hospitality what existed in Abraham’s day and culture and has endured into modern times.

“There is no ‘I’ in desert.”

I thought, we cannot really do the Christian life in isolation. We must have solitude, but not retreat. We stand before the Lord as individuals, but we live out the Christian life in community. We have this multi-layered juxtaposed calling that keeps us “in the world, but not of the world,” in need to be quiet and alone, but, to also be responsive to others. We must guard our hearts from those influences that corrupt, but be in conversation with those who are outside the faith.

If I do not start my day alone with God in an unrushed, unhurried mix of discipline and free association centered in Jesus, all bets are off. For me, the effects are immediate. I cannot really go a day without this sort of sorting. I have to nail down the stakes and nail them down deep.

The camels were great, by the way.

The antiquity of some of these sites amazes me. The culture into which Abraham was born as evidenced by the ruins of ancient Arad reinforced the bible stories of his life and explained how he was the man he was whom God could use.

The history of that city is an academic discipline and fodder for deep spiritual reflection –especially the role of idolatry and the slippery slopes of syncretism in our lives.

There is much to say, but the hour is late.

I could go on, refreshed by a dip in the Dead Sea, a mud bath, and a good dinner with new friends. However, this battery is about to die on this laptop and the deadline has come.

I am going to do some personal work on identifying the small idols in my life. I am going to broaden my understanding of evil in me and narrow my tolerance of it.

I am going to read the bible with deeper insight.

I am going to go to sleep and rethink and “re-flect” on all of this and probably have something better to say in the morning …

… but that will be too late.

So chew that for a while and I will do the same.

I am not certain where all we will stop tomorrow or what roads we shall travel, but I hope to be on the King’s Highway – one way or another.

by Tom Sims