Thoughts About Coming Home
After ten days of traveling and touring, we arrived home last Monday. If you’ve kept up on my previous posts, you’ll see that we had seven full days of touring Israel. Our eighth day was a free day, and Linda and I and a group of a few others, did a tunnel tour under the streets of Israel. It was fascinating, of course, as we were able to see aspects of the city near the Temple Mount that date before the time of Jesus.
That evening, we boarded a plane to go home.
It’s always good to get home. For Linda and me, we were anxious to see our kids and granddaughter again. Erica was out of town when we arrived so we were pleasantly surprised by how clean Brock had the house. We had a bit of jet lag the first day back, but by Tuesday, life was back to normal.
It’s quite a contrast to go from exploring tunnels deep under the streets of Jerusalem, and walking on paving stones that Jesus would have walked on, to sitting in my office in front of my laptop. And I’ve been asked since coming back to summarize our trip.
That’s hard to do. We saw so many things and took in so much information that it’s hard to summarize. But I guess I’d have to say that for me, this trip took the life of Jesus out of the realm of academia and history, to real every day life. Sitting on a quiet boat on the Sea of Galilee, viewing the shores where Jesus taught crowds, walking from the synagogue in his ministry home town of Capernaum, across the first century road to Peter’s house, and then down to the shoreline where he and Peter and others went day after day, brings a realness to the stories we know so well.
If you read my last post, you know that I was a bit put off by the extravagant churches that cover and hide the most special places in Jesus’ life. And I guess the reason it bothers me is because it takes the stories out of the reality you feel in Capernaum or the shores of Galilee, back into a feeling of hyped-up religious mythology. But just being in the land helps you sense what Jesus’ life and ministry felt like.
And now we are back home. What’s changed? Only some perspective. Because just as Jesus’ life was very real, so is ours. When it comes to honoring God and bringing him pleasure by representing him well, there’s nothing more special about being in Israel. For us, he’s placed us here, in Chicagoland. And life here is also very real. The people around us here need to see Jesus in the every day as badly as those who lived in Israel 2,000 years ago did.
So my modified perspective is simply that Jesus’ life took on a more vivid realness to me by visiting his stomping grounds, but that needs to translate into my stomping grounds, and the people around me need to see him in more vivid realness by my interaction with them.
Jesus is very real. Let’s make sure the people around us know that.