For thousands of years, Jerusalem has existed as the center of the spiritual world. The Medieval Rabbi Rashi states,
Ten measures of beauty descended on the world – nine were taken by Jerusalem, one by the rest of the world. There is no beauty like the beauty of Jerusalem.
I’m beginning to agree. Today a tempest blew across the hills of the city, scattering rain, hail and the dust of ancient prophets across our campus grounds. In Minnesota we call such a day in January, well, “typical.” Here, even nasty weather demands the attention of twenty-somethings, tearing eyes from textbooks and causing assignments turn up incomplete.
A twenty-nine year old travels to Jerusalem seeking new insights on the wild and mysterious God of burning love and relentless justice. He climbs the Mount of Olives, camps out at a monastery for a month before embarking on a semester of tiptoeing across ancient ruins, along paths worn smooth by the calloused feet of prophets and rabbis, angels and a Savior.
Everything is new: the twisted arms and skinny leaves of olives trees, Orthodox Jews muttering Torah as they pace up and down limestone streets, heads covered with tilted hats and eyes shielded by black, thick-rimmed glasses, lost in the ancient text. Here, unsuspecting travelers are met midday by screaming minarets and clanging church bells.
Everything is new, except me.
I’m the same. The same man who boarded a plane a month and a half ago, waving goodbye to a cold and snowy Minneapolis as thick clouds covered over the oval airplane window. I’m the same man, peering through crusted-over, morning eyes at Bible stories he’s read a hundred times before and wondering, praying, that God’s Spirit would bring them to life yet again.
I’m the same. I’ve carried with me luggage: books, clothes, sticks of deodorant and a toothbrush, but I’ve brought other things as well: insecurities, idolatrous tendencies, fears and hopes. There are many hidden streets and back alley nooks in the Old City, places I could speak these sins forth, and then run away in hopes of losing them forever amid the maze of shopkeepers and clergy.
They always claw their way back into my soul.
Wherever we go, there we are.
I’m the same, and always will be. Jerusalem. Minneapolis. Santiago, Chile. Demons don’t need passports.
Save the Lord’s intervention, these things will claw at me until the day I die. Life reaches into the romance of places like Jerusalem and whispers the harsh reality that a place can never change you. But God can. My tired eyes are searching the evening skyline as the wind and rain bend and curl cypress trees, thankful that the potency of God’s healing work is just as strong, here, atop Mount Zion as it on my snowy patio in Plymouth, Minnesota.
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 16:26-28).
this is beautiful!!!