07 October 2023
Calm down, folks.
First, I need to apologize. Yesterday I made an off-hand comment about wishing I could tour the Holy Land on my bicycle. Several of you encouraged me to take this seriously and offered all kinds of suggestions and promises to support it. I am humbled by your response, truly grateful for your love.
But folks, I wasn't seriously contemplating doing that. Bottom line: My convictions aren't in it. There are also reasons; it's not safe on several levels. To the best of my knowledge, the current political instability there is just too high. At a minimum, I'd have to be with a group of folks, and they would have to tolerate my presence and my concerns.
Try to understand: I use my bicycle in place of a wheelchair. I can ride pretty long and hard because I can control the amount of pressure on my joints with the gears, but I can't hike because my knees are no longer cooperative on such adventures. They aren't yet to the point where any doctor will replace them, but they hurt all the time, and would swell painfully from only so much as wandering through a grocery store. I'm under care for all of this, but I fall between the cracks on most treatments.
Still, I get by doing what I can in the rather limited challenges around my part of the world. All of that is far more than I wanted to discuss about me on this blog. Now, in case you are wondering, I've also got that iPad, so we can drop that subject, too. We can discuss technology stuff privately, but not on the blog. The topic here is the Word of God and His Covenant.
My whole point was that we can never know too much about the events in Scripture. We need to do our best as individual believers to make the Bible come to life. The was the whole point of Hebrew language in the first place -- to make the narrative of faith come to life. God has chosen some of us to invest deeply in the background details of the Biblical narrative. We get expensive schooling and buy lots of expensive books and other materials and prepare ourselves to present whatever we can find out about history, archaeology, culture, languages, etc. from that time and place.
Yeah, I missed the window on visiting the Holy Land. I don't think it's possible anymore, at least, not on my own. I realize there are a lot of support systems for DIY out there, but that's not the question, nor is it the money. I honestly do not believe the Lord wants me to go any time soon. I don't sense His covering for something like that. I might consider going through all the hassles of getting a passport, etc., if there were already a group going for a similar purpose. That means a group I could trust and vice versa, with a commitment to letting me opt out of worshiping the Zionist agenda.
So far as I know, those who lack any enthusiasm for Zionism are not even allowed to go there these days. There is no support system that I know of, and I have honestly been looking over the years. At this point, I just piggyback on the work of others, watching videos of people who have been there. Frankly, the best I can hope for is good drone footage, and 3D mapping services. I'm really only interested in the topography and land features.
Yes, I realize that there could be some very deeply satisfying moments praying in remote places Jesus likely visited, or standing in places where we have reason to believe any of the other heroes in Scripture stood, but that's the part that is so risky. This is not about my feelings or my sense of personal fulfillment.
The only reason I want to have a solid image of the landscape is to breathe more life into my knowledge of Scripture so that I can share His Word.
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