First Little Bit in Jeru

Our first field trip here in the Holy Land was to a few locations round about the city of Jerusalem. The first was a church built at a location believed to be the place where Jesus ascended into heaven. It’s a beautiful church built just at the start of the 20^th century at the top of the Mount of Olives. It was built to mimic a lot of older styles of cathedrals. There was a great view from this church.

From there we went to two different overlooks of Jerusalem. One of which was over the top of a huge cemetery. This cemetery just east of Jerusalem is where the Jewish tradition holds that Christ will return so they want to be buried here for mainly two reasons. They will resurrect right where Christ will be and they want to not have their bodies dragged for miles and miles up to the Mount of Olives in order to be resurrected (trying to avoid pain on this one I think).  After these overlooks we went to a place where we could see Bethlehem. It was a beautiful looking building. The cities here are white because of the limestone that is used and they look very stunning when you see them from a distance. Here we saw a lot of olive trees and shepherds working to move their sheep. It was amazing to see and think of how much the Holy Land has changed in the last 2,000 years and also how a lot of simple things stay the same. Bethlehem sits behind the division wall that the Israeli government has put up to separate the Palestinian land from Israel. They did this for probably a lot of reasons but the political one which actually did work effectively was to reduce the amount of attempted bombings on the Israeli territory. It is quite the controversy between the two sides. It has been one of my goals to better see the reality of this situation and the rights and wrongs of both sides. Lastly on our tour we saw an overlook of the land of Ephraim and Manasseh. All I have to say is that there is plenty of room there for all of us Ephraimites to come and settle (joking).