Israel! I’m going to Israel! I've been blessed to travel all over the world but I've seldom been more excited than I’ve been over the past few days as I've been making final preparations for my trip to Israel with my wife! We leave this coming Monday, October 23rd. I’ve been waiting almost since the day I began my relationship with Jesus to go to ‘The Holy land.” Now, the experience is only days away.
My wife, on the other hand, is a bit less enthusiastic. It’s not that she doesn’t want to go. In fact, her parents were going to send her to Israel for her high school graduation but she wrecked her car at just the right (or wrong) time and much of the graduation trip money had to go to cover repairs. So, she’s been waiting over ten years to take this trip. Her excitement is tempered by the idea that we might both die on the trip in some tragic accident and our kids would be left without their parents. This kind of reaction is normal for parents but we can’t allow ourselves to live in (or make choices based on) this kind of fear. Julie, my wife, understands all this intellectually but she is still working through the emotional side of it all. Add to these thoughts the fact that this will be her first trip overseas and she taking a big step. My first trip overseas was to London with my father in the late nineties so it’s been a while since I’ve experienced the mixture of excitement and uncertainty that comes with such a trip.
Julie and I also have certain members of our family and friends who feel it their duty to email us articles of recent car bombings and terrorist attacks that have happened within five hundred miles of our planned destinations. This has been happening to me over the past ten years or so since I began frequently traveling overseas but my wife hasn’t had the pleasure of receiving these kinds of emails until now. I often thanks my friends and family for their concern and then email them an article of the number of recent murders in their own state and this seems to lessen the frequency of the concerning correspondence.
I digress.
The point of my post was not to ask you to pray for my wife (which I’d really appreciate) nor to make light of my friends and family who think we’re less than intelligent for going to “war-ravaged” Israel (although I enjoyed it so much) but to let you know that I’ll be blogging regularly starting Monday about the experiences of our trip. I hope you will all take the time to read my posts because it’s my prayer that you would be encouraged to consider taking a trip to Israel yourself in the near future.
Until my next post…
Carpe Deum! (Seize God!)
Todd Phillips
www.toddphillips.net
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment