Wake up call at 6:30 this morning - YEA, we got to sleep in 1/2 hour!! After a great breakfast, Munir takes us to the Mount of Olives. On the bus we were blessed to have Sheila's two children, Ateret age 5 and Yoel age 3 join us. We step off the bus to a COLD and WINDY day. WOW was it cold!!! Look at the pics to see us all bundled up. From the Mount of Olives we could easily look over the Kidron Valley to the old city of Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount.
After the teaching time there we walked down the hill to the Garden of Gethsemane. We were fortunate to be allowed into a more private garden area. We had a great teaching time from Pastor Carl and time for each of us to spend some time in prayer or reading scripture before we went on to the Church of Agony. This church is built over the rock where SUPOSEDLY Christ wept in the garden. The time in the garden was very special to each of us as we spent time to ourselves in prayer or meditation.
From there we hopped back on the bus. We were all happy to get on the WARM bus after the chilly walk down the hill. The next stop was an unscheduled stop at Schindler's burial site. Only a few of us went to the site.
From there we went up to the Israel museum for the rest of the afternoon. The museum holds the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as many other literary works found in Qumran. First (outside in the cold again) we spent time at the 1:50 model of Old Jerusalem and was taught a great amount of history of the old city. The model itself is incredible with the detail and accuracy. See the pics and I'm sure they won't do the model justice. We went inside the museum and saw many of the original scrolls. The most fascinating is the whole book of Isaiah - all 66 books. It was very moving to actually see the book of Isaiah written in Hebrew. The writing was much smaller than I imagined and we all were amazed at the scribes who, under candelight, copied the sciptures word by word, letter by letter.
WOW - what a day and we are told that tomorrow will be MORE full!!!
Be sure and look at the pictures, many pictures have been added to both the albums, so be sure to look at them all - the links to the pictures sites are in earlier entries to the blog. Scroll down to find the links.
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