While You Were Sleeping...

My oh my! So much has happened since I was last able to access the internet. What a couple of days it has been. You might want to pour yourself a cup of coffee & settle in for what I'm sure will turn out to be a lengthy entry :-) [Speaking of coffee...yesterday I had coffee from a Starbucks in Amman and today I had about 7 cups of Turkish coffee from refugee families with whom we were meeting. Needless to say they were quite different atmospheres...but I digress!]

We left Amman yesterday and crossed the border into Syria. It was a relatively smooth process up until it came time to enter Syria itself.  One of the people in our group was unable to cross into Syria because she had previously visited Israel. To say the Arab world does not have very positive feelings towards Israel would be like saying Steve Harrington enjoys the wilderness from time to time! Israel is so disliked by Syria that the Syrian government will not let anyone enter the country who has a stamp in their passport from Israel. Liz did not have a stamp from Israel, but the border guard could tell from one of her other stamps that she had been there and would not let her enter. [our support of Israel is another topic for another blog :-) It is clear and fair to say that our support of Israel does not endear us to the overwhelming majority of the Arab world.]

At this point I should say that one of the real assets of our team is our translator, Jamal, who has been teaching me a middle eastern history/political class as well as an introduction to Islam class as we travel!

After being delayed for a couple of hours at the border we made our way to Damascus. The countryside was noticeably different than that of Jordan. There were more trees scattered throughout the landscape and the Bedouin people were tending their flocks. As we drove I couldn't help but imagine what it must have been like to travel in this region during Jesus' time. I had read in the morning [from Acts 9] about Saul traveling to Damascus to persecute more Christians when he had a transforming experience with Jesus. Other than the crucifixion and the reality of the resurrection, Saul/Paul's conversion to Christianity is arguably the most significant event in the spreading of the gospel...and I was on that road!

When we arrived into Damascus it looked just like any other big city. But later in the evening we went into the Old City of Damascus and it was surreal. Walls and roads and buildings that were so old. Again [not to sound like a broken record, but...] I began to imagine who had walked these streets; preached on these corners; purchased food in these squares. Many if you have shared with me the impact being in the Holy Land has had on your faith, and I thought I knew what that meant. As I look out my window and see the wall around the Old City of Damascus, having walked its streets, I understand in a new way what you meant!

I'll end this section with a non-sequitor: there is no country in the Arab world where Christianity is the majority religion. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any country where more than 10-15% of the population is Christian.  For whatever reason, that feels like news to me and I have been trying to figure out how I could not have realized this fact. As an American [and perhaps it is just me] I can tend to be pretty isolated in my view of the world. And by that I mean I presume my experience and values onto the world that I am seeing since, by and large, I pick and chose the ways in which I enter into it. I do not regularly cross borders; I do not walk daily past bombed out buildings reminding me of a past war; I do not watch a newscast that gives me the weather report for any place outside of the US. While on the surface none of these things are really that big a deal, I do wonder if we as Americans are more disconnected from the world than we would care to admit and how that disconnection may hinder the choices we make and policies we support.