Jericho

Today we had a field trip! It has been raining in Jerusalem since last night, which is fun and Israel is in a drought and really needs rain. But what's not fun is that our rooms are in outdoor halls and mine's at the very very end, so I have to run or hustle quickly to my room to not get wet. The trick to that is that the floors here are extremely slippery when wet, so you have to be very careful when you are running to your room. When we were having FHE we were sitting in one of the classrooms which has a huge glass window overlooking the city. We saw a flash of lightning and IMMEDIATELY after was a crash of thunder. It shook the building, I felt like the glass was going to break! Kind of scary, but mostly cool. I don't think the Lord is going to let anything happen to this building...well, I hope not.

For our field trip we went over to what's called the rain shadow (where it's not supposed to rain) into the desert. First we went to the Temptation Monastery where it is believed that Christ as tempted by the devil while he was fasting in the wilderness. The women had to cover up their hair while they were there, that was kind of fun but it got really hot and steamy cause we had to hike up to the Monastery.



The monastery is built right into the cliffs and so when we were there we could go out on the balcony and look out over the modern city of Jericho. It was really pretty, Jericho is an oasis city so even though it's right in the middle of the desert there is actually a lot of agriculture and green. Also, fun fact, Jericho is below sea level. Very below sea level. And from the monastery balcony we could see some of the dead sea, which is the lowest place on earth. Awesome. From the monastery we went to the site of old testament Jericho and looked at the archeology digs there. That was interesting, we could see the original wall.

Then we hiked up to a look out point over the Judaean Wilderness. I think that was my favorite part. We talked about the good Samaritan and about the setting that Christ set up in the story, which was between Jericho and Jerusalem, which is the Judaean Wilderness. I really liked looking out over the vast desert and picturing Jesus fasting there and testing his mortal physical strength and resisting temptation. Makes me feel like I can resist better knowing that He put himself through it to better himself.




So it has been a really good day, I learned a lot and I definitely had some good experiences. Egypt on Thursday, I can't wait!