At a few minutes past 8 the bus roared out toward our first stop, the Mount of Beatitudes. There’s a church on the spot that looks out over the Sea of Galilee. It was so windy we all huddled together trying to hear the lecture from the guide, then went over to a quieter spot where my dad read the beginning section of the Beatitudes: blessed are the… How could Jesus speak to 5,000 people without a microphone? Well, it just so happens that there’s a natural amphitheatre formed by the geography and the way the wind historically blows. My dad did a test on one of his trips and the people sitting at the top could hear the person speaking in a normal voice at the bottom of the hill. Next we drove about an hour up to Caesarea Philippi, now called Banias. It used to be Panias when it was a Roman temple to the god Pan, but the Arabs couldn’t pronounce “p” so when they took over it became Banias. This was the place where Jesus told Simon Peter “on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” We had a bit of a discussion on different interpretations of what the “gates of Hades” meant. One of the group is a pastor from Florida and he suggested the term meant systems of government, which brought him to the point that the American government can try to squash Christianity all it wants, but it will never prevail. Along the next drive the guide was being pestered by so many questions that he said what I thought was the funniest line of the day “there’s a lot to see in this country and you can’t expect to see it all in one minute.” As we drove along the Golan Heights we viewed old Syrian installations and heard about how the poor kibbutz members had to live with the Syrians taking potshots at them from above all the time. We drove past large lines of trees that had been planted to protect cars as they drove down the road from being shot at. What a way to live! We also saw some fencing that was the old border with Syria and there were danger signs – the guide told us there were still mines in the area that hadn’t all been found. Cows graze on those hills and there’s a large population of Egyptian vultures who live in that area – mainly feeding on cows who stumble over a mine and explode. I don’t know if he was pulling our leg on that one, but we did see a lot of vultures. Lunch was at Mas’ada (mah-sah-day) which is different than Masada down south. This is one of the four Druz villages on the Golan Heights. You can always recognize a Druz man by the MC Hammer type pants they wear because they believe the Messiah will be born of a man and could, at any time, drop out of their private area…so they wear a kind of balloon pants to catch him. The Druz of the Golan Heights used to live in Syria and still await the return of Syrian control, as opposed to the Druz of Mt. Carmel who fight in the Israeli army. Anyway, we had a good Druz meal of salads, hummus, falafel, babaganoosh and…french fries. Cups of strong coffee and baklava finished us off. Next we stopped at a monument near the Valley of Tears. During the Six Days War it’s been argued that Israel came closest to losing everything when Syria brought 1700 tanks across a 50-mile stretch of the Golan Heights. Because the war began on Yom Kippur, the Syrians were only met by a skeleton force of secular Jews in 100-200 tanks. Those secular Jews say they became believers in God during those few horrible days of fighting because they said God fought for them. For instance, some Syrian tanks were found still running with no one in them. Later, when they asked the Syrians why they’d fled they said “if you’d seen the forces we were up against you would have fled too.” Interesting thing is, there were no Israeli forces in that area. Down from the Golan Heights we came to Capernaum which used to be a center of commerce in Jesus’ time. If you told a story in Capernaum it would make its way to all kinds of different places because major trade routes went through there. We saw Simon Peter’s house where Jesus healed his mother-in-law. We then hit two churches in quick succession – the Church of the Multiplication and the Church of Peter’s Primacy. What was interesting to me about these two sites was that Christians weren’t allowed to build churches until some time in the 400’s. So for at least 300 years the traditions passed from parent to child – this is the rock where Jesus passed out 5 loaves of bread to feed 5,000…this is the place where Jesus told Peter to feed his sheep. When Constantine decreed that Christianity was a legal religion churches popped up over these traditional sites. Finally we took a ride on the Sea of Galilee from Gineseret back to the pier in front of our hotel in Tiberius. The guide offered us a chance to try to walk on water, but nobody took him up on it. We had a serious devotion led by a member of the group, talking about different storms in our lives that God can calm and pull us through. Well, I better wrap it up. I’ve got a couple minutes to get down to dinner, then some people are going to the Galilee Experience which I would describe except I have no idea what it is…and others are going to the diamond factory. You can probably guess which way I’m headed. ;)