My bags are packed, my boarding passes are printed and all I have is roughly 24 hrs of total travel time before I touch down at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel!
After four months of discussing, thinking, reading, dreaming, watching documentaries, processing and learning, the journey is now underway. Today I embark on a life changing experience with the members of The Global Immersion Project's first ever global learning community. TGIP's focus is to cultivate difference-makers through immersion in global narratives. My focus is to be fully present in such a way that I am ready and available to hear what God has for me to learn.
On January 25th I hung up the phone after a long call with my good friend and Global Immersion Project co-founder, Jer Swigart. I took a deep breath as I tried to digest the fact that he had just invited me into the process of making a dream of his become a reality. The dream: to cultivate difference makers through the immersion in global narratives. The location: Israel. “The Holy Land,” I thought to myself. “Holy crap!” I immediately picked the phone back up and called my wife, Lana. As I started to share with great excitement all that Jer and I had discussed, I began to realize how little I actually knew about this historic place rooted at the center of my Christian faith.
Through most of February and into the beginning of March this trip was honestly something I had just said yes to and wasn't deeply rooted in. I had not really begun to engage with any of the realities that came with embarking on an adventure to the, conflict driven, land of Israel. When I shared with people that I would be going to Israel in August, their feedback was mixed. It was either how cool they thought it was going to be to visit the places that Jesus and the disciples walked, or how concerned they were for me as I entered what they knew to be hostile territory with historically conflicting narratives. They would ask if I was more excited to go to the Temple Mount, the Sea of Galilee or the Mount of Olives. Or they’d ask if I could afford to leave my role as a husband and dad of two little girls to place myself in harms way? And even though these were all thoughts or questions I had raised in my own head, there was a bigger one that God was starting to press on my heart. How are you going to embrace the posture of becoming a learner? How are you going to accept that I have called you to be stretched? I had much more to learn than I knew and I was facing questions that came from a skewed perspective of a land others didn’t seem to know very well either.
Therefore as I entered into our teams’ first meeting on March 20th, I knew three realities. One, my understanding of the relationship between God and Israel was limited to only a few passages in the Old Testament, where God promises the land and a nation to the descendants of Abraham (meaning his son Jacob and therefore Israel). Two, my knowledge of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict at that time, started and ended with NY Times articles on throwing rocks, blogs about peace protests and global headlines regarding a war over the land both parties occupy. And three, as a leader in ministry, God had brought forth this opportunity with TGIP so that my awareness of both of the above would grow. And because God is moving in my heart to comprehend that it is one thing to read about issues of injustice around the world and something altogether different to find myself processing its realities as I sit in the middle of it.
It did not take long for my inner emotions to wrestle with the tension that exists between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As we read and watched real stories from both sides unfold... I immediately felt my heart breaking for one side and then for the other. We 're supposed to choose sides aren't we? I don't think so. I struggled to understand why they couldn’t just choose peace. Then history began to unfold with each story I read, each character or person I was introduced to and each film I watched, I learned a bit more about the battle for this land and the peace that seems so vital for each side...
At this point, I will not break down all the details of my studies, but I will pass along the fact that I am very eager to be on the ground, in Israel, with the rest of the TGIP team. And even though I have taken in a lot of information over the last few months and I feel more prepared to enter into the conflicting narratives then before, I still only feel like I am scratching the surface. In order to learn I must proceed with humility into this time.
I am not sure if this is fully feasible or not, but having been moved by God into this time, I want my narrative and the eyes of my heart to be opened (Ephesians 1:18) to what it means to live in His unfolding story for the sake of others, and as a result I hope that God uses me to cultivate others to do the same.
Therefore as I entered into our teams’ first meeting on March 20th, I knew three realities. One, my understanding of the relationship between God and Israel was limited to only a few passages in the Old Testament, where God promises the land and a nation to the descendants of Abraham (meaning his son Jacob and therefore Israel). Two, my knowledge of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict at that time, started and ended with NY Times articles on throwing rocks, blogs about peace protests and global headlines regarding a war over the land both parties occupy. And three, as a leader in ministry, God had brought forth this opportunity with TGIP so that my awareness of both of the above would grow. And because God is moving in my heart to comprehend that it is one thing to read about issues of injustice around the world and something altogether different to find myself processing its realities as I sit in the middle of it.
It did not take long for my inner emotions to wrestle with the tension that exists between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As we read and watched real stories from both sides unfold... I immediately felt my heart breaking for one side and then for the other. We 're supposed to choose sides aren't we? I don't think so. I struggled to understand why they couldn’t just choose peace. Then history began to unfold with each story I read, each character or person I was introduced to and each film I watched, I learned a bit more about the battle for this land and the peace that seems so vital for each side...
At this point, I will not break down all the details of my studies, but I will pass along the fact that I am very eager to be on the ground, in Israel, with the rest of the TGIP team. And even though I have taken in a lot of information over the last few months and I feel more prepared to enter into the conflicting narratives then before, I still only feel like I am scratching the surface. In order to learn I must proceed with humility into this time.
I am not sure if this is fully feasible or not, but having been moved by God into this time, I want my narrative and the eyes of my heart to be opened (Ephesians 1:18) to what it means to live in His unfolding story for the sake of others, and as a result I hope that God uses me to cultivate others to do the same.
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