A Day in the Life....

...of someone who lived a long long time ago.

Today we had an awesome field trip and got to do some pretty fun stuff. It was really neat. We went to a biblical lands center. (I forgot the name of it-memory of a goldfish). We got to do all sorts of things people did in bible times, including.....

Drawing water from a well

Leading our beloved sheep (Stef, Anne, and Me)

Grinding Spice
(Me, Shamra, and Christine killin

the oregano)

Playing with Fig Trees

and Reading from the Torah (okay, maybe not biblical, but still cool. Every single letter of every Torah scroll is handwritten and can't have a single mistake. It's crazy, they have "Torah Writing School" and we got to meet an official Torah scribe!)

Cool Fact of the Day!! When we were drawing water from the well our guide talked to us about the story of Rebekah and I gained some awesome insight into how amazing of a woman she actually was. Quick recap: When Abraham's servant goes to Haran to find a wife for Isaac, he comes to the well after traveling a very long way. He's incredibly thirsty as well as his 10 camels (who haven't drinken for weeks probably). He decides he'll be able to find a wife for Isaac by testing the next woman that comes to get water from the well. Rebekah comes to the well, and the servant asks if she can get him some water. She doesn't even hesitate to jump to his service, but what's more, she offers to give water to each of his camels. Now, I personally always thought that was cool of her, but never really thought about it much more than that. Turns out that one dip of the bucket down the well brings up about 5 quarts. Well, each of the camels, after such a long journey, would have drinken about 150 quarts. The servant had 10 camels. If you do the math, that means that Rebekah voluntarily retrieved water from the well about 300 times for Abraham's servant. 300 TIMES!! And that thing is not light, I'll tell you that much. She probably would have spent a good couple of hours getting water for this man and his camels, and there's no way that's an easy task. It had to have exhausted her physically. But she did it willingly! For a complete stranger! Seriously, what a woman. How often do we take the time to do stuff like that for someone else? Let alone for a complete stranger? I was blown away by the whole thing. Isaac got himself a gem.

The day was awesome! And now, for your viewing pleasure (congratulations on reaching the end of this rather long post):

The stache (sp?) I saw today in the Old City. You can't see its full glory very well in this picture, but MAN! It was incredible. It reminded me of you, Dad!

Well, that's it for now! We're leaving in just a few short hours for Galilee! It's gonna be so great, I'm so excited. The majority of Christ's ministry was spent in Galilee so we'll be seeing most of the locations of events in the New Testament. How could that not be exciting?! We'll be in there for about a week and a half, but I'm taking my computer so we'll see if I can update you while we're there. No promises though...Lata!