Egypt Pictures

Hey, I just got my Egypt pictures on Facebook. Sorry it took so long. Check them out. I hope to see you all soon!

Epilogue: Adjusting

It is surreal that I’m back in the states. I like being back with my family and friends, but I haven’t missed the states too much. I would much rather be overseas. I slept pretty well my first night back. I was exhausted by 9:30 pm, so I went to bed. After five hours of sleep I woke up for about four hours in the middle of the night, then fell back asleep for another five hours. When I woke up in the morning, I looked up and saw all of my stuff in my room and it made me sick, having so much stuff. I had the bare minimum overseas and it was great. It was all I needed. Now I just have a bunch of stuff lying around. I got up eventually and showered. My last shower had been in Egypt. I walked into the bathroom this morning, realized I had forgotten a towel, but remembered we had a drawer of them. I opened the drawer and there they were, ten towels just waiting to be used. This may sound normal to everybody else, but for me it was crazy. I had one towel to be responsible for the last three months. I had to readjust to American toilets too. On JUC campus we couldn’t flush toilet paper, so we threw it all away right beside the toilet. When we were in hotels for trips, we usually had a bidet, which I prefer over toilet paper, so I had used those. Now I can actually throw toilet paper into the toilet.

Now I’m sitting here, surrounded by any material object I could ever want. Those that I don’t have I can easily access. This isn’t the life I was made for. I see now how much Israel has prepared me to live overseas longterm. I love these conveniences, but this is a vacation spot for me. I long to be where there are no conveniences. A phone is a strange thing to me. A bedroom full of possessions is overwhelming. This computer is something I’d rather have as a treat, a surprise convenience to use maybe once a year. God has prepared me to live overseas in an area that has nothing. He has put that desire on my heart. But for now I am stuck in the vacation spot, where I am distracted by conveniences. Where relationships with people and God are hard to upkeep, just because there are so many other things to be doing. Because texting and communicating over the computer is so much easier than being in person, but it’s not the same. So now I’m back to fighting the distractions. I’m back to needing a stronger resistance to material objects, because they tend to hurt relationships more. Living in the states is a completely different spiritual battle than living in other countries, like Egypt and Israel. There are different traps and holes to fall into.

I’m happy to see my friends and family though. I’m back for another season of my life, until God calls me elsewhere for my life. I have missed people here and it will be great to see and talk to them again. You all mean so much to me and I feel blessed by having you in my life. Thanks to God and you all.

Egypt Happenings and My Return to the States

My 8 day trip to Egypt was amazing. We spent most of it in mainland Egypt along the Nile and a couple days in the Sinai Peninsula. We left at 5 am last Saturday. It took all day in a bus to get to Egypt.

In Egypt we saw many things. We looked at a lot of tombs and temples. We went to Memphis, Aswan, Luxor, and Cairo. We saw about 8 pyramids total, including the great pyramids, and were able to go in about three of them. We went to the Aswan dam, which is a big dam for the Nile that has pretty much ruined the water, but at least maintains its flow. We rode camels into the desert. That was something I had looked forward to a lot. They were bouncy, but fun.

We went to a Nubian village to hang out with a family. Nubians are a people group without a country. This family had pet crocodiles we could hold and they sang and danced with us. It was quite entertaining.

We took two sleeper trains this trip, in order to save time while traveling. I was on one last year in China, and it wasn’t too different than the Egyptian ones. It’s kind of like flying. The meals aren’t too great, the toilets get gross, and it can be hard to sleep, even though we have beds. It’s a good experience to do maybe once a year. It’s not the most fun.

Some of the ancient temples we went to were the Kom Ombo, Edfu, Karnak, Habu, Hatshepsut’s, and Luxor. The temples were all pretty similar, but each was for a different god. They were huge with hieroglyphics everywhere. They were amazing to see.

We went to the Valley of the Kings, which is a valley that kings put tombs in once they realized big monuments like pyramids were a bad idea, because they stood out and were just asking to be robbed. So kings started blindfolding their workers, taking them to the valley to build the underground tombs, and blindfolding them to go back home when they finished. They blindfolded them because it was almost always the builders of the tombs that later raided them. The underground tombs were neat. They just had little entrance holes but some went underground for miles, just a tunnel with rooms off of it every now and again. These tombs also were not exposed to outside weathering, so they were in great condition with the original paint and everything still on them.

I wasn’t able to take a lot of pictures in mainland Egypt, because most places we went prohibited pictures of all the good stuff. We couldn’t take our cameras into the Valley of the Kings at all. I still managed to take hundred of pictures, though, so I will post them soon.

In the Sinai we visited an oasis. It was neat because it had many trees that seemed like they were in the middle of the desert. We also took a jeep ride through the sands to a mountain that had an ancient temple to Hathor, an Egyptian god, and turquoise mines. We ate dinner that night in a bedouin camp. It was great being in the middle of nowhere at night. The stars were extremely bright. It reminded of us of God’s promise to Abraham, that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky.

We went to bed around 10 pm that night. We woke up at 2 am the next morning to climb Mt Sinai and watch the sunrise. We were told it would be cold, but we weren’t prepared for how cold. We climbed up in the dark with flashlights. There was an easy trail to climb, then about 900 steps after the trail to the top of the mountain. There were a lot of people making the climb. Once we got to the steps we were getting tired and feeling the cold. Near the top, a strong wind started blowing, literally blowing some people over. We made it to the top and had to wait a couple hours for the sunrise. We were freezing so we rented a bedouin blanket, which the bedouin were making a lot of money renting out to everybody who was freezing. There were maybe 100 people at the top. I’m sure the blanket hadn’t been washed for years and was used as a camel saddle. We didn’t care though, because of how cold we were. We were all cuddling and buried under the blanket. Some people who climbed (not in our group) didn’t even watch the sunrise because they were so miserable. Many were sleeping and doing whatever they could to stay warm. It was a hard two hours but the sunrise was beautiful. We thought we might miss it because there was a thunderstorm in the distance right next to where the sun was coming up. Luckily the sun didn’t come up behind the storm. Once the sun came up a few of us started running down the mountain and warmed up really quick. We were able to go in St Catherine’s monastery, which is the oldest monastery in the middle east, I believe. It has survived so long because they made a pact with the Muslims to have peace, and that has been honored. We also experienced the harshness of the sand on the mountain. The wind would blow the sand up and we could actually see it coming at us, so we could prepare for it. It pelted us and got in our mouths and eyes and nose, and there was no way to stop it. So that was an interesting experience. We all agreed we’d never want to experience a sand storm.

We spent all day Saturday getting back to Jerusalem. At the checkpoint between Egypt and Israel we encountered a problem. One of the kids had bought a solid alabaster ball in Egypt. When the Israel police ran this through the scanners, they couldn’t identify it and thought it was a bomb. They cleared the whole building out within thirty seconds in an organized manner, keeping the people of each section of the checkpoint in their respective sections, but in different buildings. I said I was with the kid so he wouldn’t be alone and we got swept off to a different building. We had to drop our bags and rid ourselves of all electronic devices, in case we had a detonator or something. He got asked some questions and it all turned out fine. Everything went back to normal about thirty minutes later. It was pretty hectic though. The kid was pretty shaken up.

We got back to Jerusalem for supper Saturday night. My ride to the airport came at 12:45 am Sunday morning, so I just packed and relaxed til it came, saving my sleep for the plane. The Israel airport security was the most strict I’ve ever been through. They searched all of my bags thoroughly. I had a plaque with a Bible verse written in Arabic on it. This got me into the most trouble. They interrogated me about it for ten minutes, asking if I knew the Arabic language and why I had been in the West Bank. I almost got it taken away. I’m not sure why because it is just a plaque, but they ended up letting me keep it. I flew from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam, then to Detroit, then from Detroit to Des Moines. It was a total of 14 hours flying, about 20 hours from Jerusalem to home. In Detroit I was worried about the flight home being cancelled, because I heard flights to Minneapolis were cancelled. We loaded the plane, though, and I planned to sleep that flight, so I fell asleep as we were being taxied to the runway. I woke up an hour later and was very disoriented. We were on the ground and I was thinking there was no way I slept through the take off and the landing, but I had slept for as long as the flight was supposed to take. It turned out we were still in Detroit. I’m not sure what had happened during that hour, but we were just driving around the runways when I woke up and there was a lot of snow on the ground. I just wanted to get home after all of this travel, so I was thankful when we finally took off. I made it home safe and sound, all in one piece.

Thanks for all of your prayers and help while I was on this trip. It was much appreciated and needed.

Finals and Egypt

Its my last day in Jerusalem. It all went way too fast and it’ll be weird to leave. We’re going down to Egypt tomorrow (Saturday) morning. We’ll spend 8 days there seeing the sites and learning. We all have to give a presentation for the class while in Egypt and we get to write pages and pages of journals to turn in at the end. So its definitely not a tourist trip. There will still be homework involved. But we’re all looking forward to it. It’ll be an amazing experience.

I had my Arabic final yesterday. It was my last time in Bethlehem. None of us had prepared well for the final and did not know all of the information, but our teacher didn’t care and gave us some answers. I told her in Arabic that I didn’t know anything on the test (Bar9fish kull ishi), so she said i get full marks just for that, but she was kidding. I feel like I did well overall. She then gave us some good pastries. They were like donuts with chocolate icing and vanilla pudding in the center.

I’ve just been able to relax since my Arabic final. Most people have more finals today that are worth 100% of their grade, so they’ve all been studying a lot. I’ve been doing well at distracting them.

We have to clean our rooms thoroughly before we check out. I’m in the biggest room on campus, which has been great until we had to clean the whole thing. It wasn’t messy with our things, but it collected dust and cobwebs and such, as all things do. So one of my roommates and I cleaned our portion and checked out. Meanwhile my other roommate came in complaining about having a huge final and paper due today that he hadn’t even started. I didn’t feel too sorry for him, since I saw him messing around on the computer most of the day.

The other day, two friends and I went to the Israel Museum. It houses some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, an art exhibit, and a lot of archaeological things from around the world. It was very cool.

I’ll miss most of the people here. I’ve definitely learned a lot from them as a whole, and things from each individual. It’s been a great experience coming over here. God has taught me a lot and helped me grow in many ways.

Last night I met up with a friend and four of her friends. Two of them were American, one German, one Australian, and one Israeli. It was a great time getting to hang out with such a diverse group that were near my age. We sat around and talked for a while. We talked some about theology and it was great to hear voices from all ends of the earth. They were all Christians. I love getting a perspective on what the world thinks about different things, and that was a great panel of people for that.

The rest of today is full of relaxing. Hopefully we’ll do the ramparts walk around the Old City, which is walking on the Old City walls. That is my last thing on my to do list. Then we’ll play frisbee like every Friday and have Shabbat dinner. We’re also celebrating Christmas tonight with carols at a nearby church and cookies at JUC afterward.

I’ll be home a week from Sunday (the 12th) around 4:30 pm Central Time. I hope to see you all soon. I appreciate all of your support and love while I’ve been away. Please pray for the trip to Egypt, that all goes well and everybody stays safe. Also pray for everybody’s flights back home. Thank you!

End of Semester Fun

Last night we celebrated Thanksgiving. We play ultimate frisbee every Friday, so we played that again this Friday. After frisbee we played football. We had a lot of people show up. It was fun to run around and get a good game of football going. We had some complainers, like there always are, but it was all fun.

After football we had a big Thanksgiving dinner with pumpkin, turkey, stuffing, gravy and green beans. A Japanese couple also brought sushi. So I had sushi for the first time on Thanksgiving in Israel made by a Japanese couple. After dinner we had a feast of desserts. There was pumpkin and pecan pie, cookies, donuts, french silk brownies, apple crisp, and more. It was great. I had some apple cinnamon tea and coffee.

We then had a movie going. We chose between some different Christmas movies. I was strongly in favor of White Christmas, which is probably my favorite Christmas movie. So we got to watch that movie, which I was glad about. Most people had not seen it and all that saw it for the first time said it was a good movie. Many people left and watched a different movie instead, so they missed out.

Today we are going to play ultimate frisbee again in Beit Jala with the school kids and teachers. It was a blast last time and I’m looking forward to doing it again. After frisbee we’re going to have a bonfire and bbq with the kids and students. Then after we get back from Beit Jala, a bunch of the JUC students are going out for some fun.

Thursday night we had a guys poker night. We played Texas Hold’em and the winner got some money. It was great to escape the girls and hang out with the guys. We went to a grad students’ apartment, so we had a great time.

Down to a week left. I have 4 free days in that week, in which I am going to finish my last paper, of which i have 1.5 pages left, and study for my Arabic final, which will be very easy. So I get to relax the rest of the time and enjoy it with my friends. I’m looking forward to it.

Winding Down

Well, there’s not a whole lot that is new. I have 2 finals and 1 paper left in the semester, one every week til the end. After my final tomorrow I will be home free, because the last paper and final will be very easy. So it’ll be nice to not have to worry about school again and just be able to hang out with friends and keep seeing the sites in Jerusalem. I’m getting to know some really cool guys now, toward the end of the semester. One is a grad student and we had hung out some, but not a lot. Last night we decided we should spend a few of our last free days down in Eilat, which is the southernmost tip of Israel. Then the short-term coordinator here, who is the same age as some of the grad students, is also a very cool guy that is easy for me to get along with. So it sucks I just started some friendships now, but we’ll make the most of them. The students have been getting into more outdoor activities, so that’s nice. I love to play outdoor sports of any kind. But I finished much of my homework early and everybody else is still working on it, so I have to find things to do by myself for a while.

This Friday we are celebrating Thanksgiving…and Christmas I guess. We are having a Thanksgiving dinner and we’re gonna play some football. I’m excited for it. Then after dinner I guess they’re gonna show a couple Christmas movies for some reason.

We’re getting excited for our trip to Egypt at the end of the semester. About half of the students are going. I think we leave Dec 4th and we get back the 11th. Then we all have to be moved off campus on the 12th. My flight home leaves at 5:30 am the day after we get back from Egypt. So that’ll be hectic.

Some of us have been trying to figure out how we’re gonna get everything home, because we definitely have more than we brought. We’re planning on leaving a bunch of stuff behind. We can donate clothes and leave school books that weigh a lot. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out.

Pray that we keep growing as the semester comes to an end, and that we still make an impact and are impacted by this culture we are living in. Pray that we keep growing closer to God and strive to walk in His ways all of our days. I really appreciate your prayers more than anything. Thank you so much. You all are in my thoughts and prayers.

Jordan

My class went to Jordan for four days (Thursday to Sunday) for a field study. Jordan is a very beautiful country. I loved it. We visited many biblical sites like Dibon, Heshbon, Ramot-Gilead, Jerash, Gadara, Ammon, Bozrah, Mount Nebo, and more. Under Jordanian law we had to have a Jordanian guide, so our professor wasn’t in charge the whole time, but he managed to convince the guide to give him a majority of the time. I also enjoyed the country because Arabic is the national language, which I have slowly been learning over the semester. So I was able to speak more Arabic than normal.

We weren’t supposed to drink any of the water, so our prof bought us a liter of water a day, which wasn’t enough. He also told us we wouldn’t need money for anything, but I would have loved money for more water. So now I’m recovering from dehydration.  I was pretty light-headed and I had a headache yesterday. I made sure to get lots of sleep last night so I would recover, even though I had a test this morning. I do feel much better today. I’ve been drinking lots of water too.

My favorite stop was at Petra. Petra is a city that was carved out of the mountains. It had one road in, the Siq, that was long and well protected. It was very beautiful. It was cool to see everything just carved out of the mountains. Most of what I saw were tombs, even though our guide said that wasn’t all it was. The rock was very colorful and beautiful. Petra is where Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade was partly filmed. The movie included the Treasury, which is one of the more beautiful buildings in Petra. Dan and I wandered off on our own again, first finding the High Place, which was where sacrifices were done. We then tried to find our way to the Monastery, which is supposed to be the best place in Petra. We ended up missing our route and heading off west out of the city. We walked into a bedouin camp but decided to keep going. A little bedouin girl came running over to us and I talked to her in broken Arabic. We kept going and ran into another little bedouin girl who asked where we wanted to go. She said the Monastery was the other direction, but invited us in for tea. Her mom then came out and we talked about where we were and how to get back, then we were invited in for tea by the mom. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have some tea with a bedouin family. Their house was a tiny one room house, maybe 7 x 20 ft. It was also carved out of the mountain. They had a small fence out front. The mom had 6 or 7 children that were playing with rope, tying up in a line and dragging each other around. The dad wasn’t around. They had goats that were trying to sneak inside the fence, just as an outdoor cat or dog might try to sneak in the house in the United States. We couldn’t talk much, but tried a little bit in broken Arabic and English. It was still great to just observe. The little kids were having a blast with just some rope, nothing special. The tea was very good, as I have found all indigenous tea to be. Very sweet. We left the bedouin family sooner than I would have liked, but we wanted to make it to the Monastery before having to leave Petra. We got back and ended up only being a hill off from where we needed to be when we wandered the wrong direction. We saw a couple more sites and tried to get up to the Monastery but had little time. I turned back with some people coming down because I was already exhausted, but Dan ran up to the top and back down. I didn’t mind missing the Monastery though. I was much happier getting to connect with the bedouin people. That was so cool.

That’s just one part of the trip, but a definite highlight. By the end of the trip it felt like we had been in Jordan for weeks. It was weird going back to JUC. And we came back to the end of the semester, which means final tests and papers. It’s grind time and none of us are ready for it. It’s sad there’s only a month left. We all have mixed emotions. It’ll be good to get back home again, but sad to leave this community and Israel.

Pictures are up of Jordan now. Thanks for your prayers! I appreciate and love you all!

Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve updated. I was on a 4 day field study to Jordan and we just got back last night. I’ll update you on that in the next post.

While on the field study I read a book called Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl by N.D. Wilson. It’s an easy-reading apologetic on God’s existence and how that works with what we see as evil. Wilson has some very unnique thoughts on the world and puts a new perspective on God and His workings. I want to share some of it with you. I’m just gonna spew some of my favorite parts out. Follow along, it will be good.

Snow is overused. One sentimental, overly structured ice flake might have some value. But God never seems capable of moderation or of understanding the basic concepts behind supply and demand. He constantly devalues His own products. Give me one flake, a cool room, and a magnifying glass and I will admire its artistry. Try counting the flakes. Really count them. I’ll step back outside for a quick estimate. Let’s be conservative. Assuming we’re in the middle of this storm and it only stretches ten miles in each direction, and assuming that the storm is a tiny one hundred feet tall, and skipping the preexisting ground accumulation, and eyeball estimating the frenzied blizzard’s air content at a meager ten flakes per cubic foot, then we are looking at about 11,151,360,000,000 flakes in the air above a small patch in Idaho at one particular moment on Christmas night at the end of the year 2007. Just this storm, this tiny little slice of winter could divvy out seventeen hundred flakes to every person on this planet. More impressively, that number has the US national debt beat by trillions. If I could get a penny for each one, then I’d make the Forbes rich-people list (somewhere behind the Wal-Mart heirs). – pgs 9-11

Of course, the nonexistence of God is nothing more than a nonsense option. The categories of good and evil themselves require some sort of transcendent standard. What makes things good? What makes things evil? Morality is cultural preference (which cannot be said to be right or wrong) and fundamentally relative. People are raped in this world, and rape is evil. Because evil exists, there must be no God. Because there is no God the badness of rape downgrades to a mere matter of societal taste. In God’s absence rape is no longer fundamentally evil. I’ve watched the Discovery Channel. I’ve enjoyed the Discovery Channel. But in that world, if I want to reproduce with you or tear you limb from limb, I just need to be bigger and stronger than you are. You look pretty small and a little sickly. Shall I feed you to my young? Why not? Cannibalism might not be condoned in your culture, but it has a long and storied tradition in mine. Are you saying your culture is superior, that it is somehow right while mine is wrong? You’re being a racist, but luckily you’re still small, and even racists taste good in casserole. – pgs 72-73

The evolutionary and Big Boom picture is uglier than mere paint splatters and a wandering, pointless, cosmic, global, national, state, and personal history. What is good and what is bad? Isn’t rape an evolutionary impulse? Isn’t trading in every postmenopausal wife for a fresh bit of breeding flesh a sound evolutionary move? – pg 133

. . . a person should produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Introducing . . . the ethics of gang rape and racial oppression. Goodness by majority rule has always gone well in the past. Just make sure there are more people enjoying the show than there are actually being fed to the lions. – pg 134

Evil, that which displeases God, should be gone. So it should. But how? When? What is it that you are assessing? Would Pride and Prejudice be improved by throwing away every page prior to the resolution, by erasing every character flaw, every misunderstanding and dispute? – pg 84

Ansel Adams once took a photograph he titled “Jeffrey Pine, Sentinel Dome.” (Click the title to see it). Could we improve this picture? How can we make it not better but best? Remove the tension and the contrast. Remove the black. All of it. Remove the struggle and the inevitable end. Leave the white. Only white. And now it is perfect. Perfectly blank. – pg 85

Hamlet was no atheist. God was very real for him, as was his own guilt. He did, however, come to the conclusion that the play in which he lived (his life) couldn’t possibly be designed by an author, or in any way be intentional. His reasoning went something like this: If there is an author, then he must either be poor and lack control of his art, or he must be evil and malicious. How could a good and competent author ever allow such hardship in my life? He has a point. Ophelia dies (to mention only one casualty). Why? She was an innocent, a bystander. What greater good did that death serve? Either the author disliked it and was unable to stop it, or he liked it and is a foul brute indeed. The most satisfactory answer is clearly that there was no author. – pgs 97-98

Every last material creature on this globe will come to an end. If God has the authority to choose me out of a near infinite number of possible human combinations and call me into existence out of nothing; if He has the authority to choose my parents, my race, my birthplace, my height, my intelligence, the size of my nostrils; if He has the authority to design my teeth from scratch, then He has the authority to choose my end. – pg 112

Take a step and thank God, for He holds you in His hand. Never ask to be put down. Never struggle for separation or for worth apart from His gifts. Breathe, taste His world, His words, and marvel that you are here to feel the blowing swirl of life. To be blown by it. – pg 181

I have much more highlighted in the book than this, but much of it needs pages of context. I highly recommend the book. It has changed my thinking about many things. Wilson is a very entertaining author, too. My next blog will be up soon.

Local Friends

I really love the friendliness of this culture. I’ve become friends with two shopkeepers that work together. I went there today to exchange money and get some stuff. I walk into the shop and Shabban, the shopkeeper, yells,”Marhaba! (Hello) What can I get you to drink?” I said anything and he’s like, “No tell me, I can get you anything.” So I said tea cuz they make it really good for the shopkeepers here. He calls somebody up and I have a glass of tea in my hand in five minutes. I just hung around the shop for a while. Then I finally started browsing. A hired guy about my age was helping me who I have never bought from before. Prices are very flexible so you wanna know who you’re buying from and be friends with them to get a good price. So this kid, Solomon, knew I knew Shabban and Rida, so that gave me an instant in. I started talking to Solomon in broken Arabic and told him I was studying here. Once he figured out I wasn’t just a tourist he opened up to me more. I learned his name and we talked for a bit. It’s great to meet new people and have local friends. Plus I got a really good price on stuff when it came time to buy. Now I have another friend I can go into the old city and just visit. I don’t have to buy anything, I can just go in, get anything I want to drink, and converse. It’s really cool. I love this culture. It is very different than America. We don’t really make friends with shopkeepers in America and even if we do, it usually won’t be maintained. This is what I love about Israel. This is what I will most definitely miss when I go back home.

Halloween

I met up with the ICS team on Sunday. We met after church and walked around the Old City. I showed them the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, David’s Tomb, JUC, and helped them do some bartering when it came time to shop. It was great to see and hang out with them again.

Later on Sunday we had a Halloween party on campus. A lot of people dressed up, we got a tour of the cemetery connected to campus, we watched Charlie Brown and Garfield Halloween movies, and we played some games. It was a good night. There were a lot of good costumes. One girl just had a sign around her neck that said “Go ceilings!” And she kept cheering for ceilings. I didn’t understand it for the longest time, but I finally understood that she was a ceiling fan. A bunch of the girls dressed up as the guys. One girl had my hat and I was like, “Hey! Thats my hat!” I thought she was dressed up as a farm girl. Then I stupidly exclaimed, “You’re wearing exactly what I wore today!” And then I finally understood that she was dressed up as me. I was a little slow on that one.

We’re sadly winding down the semester. We’ve all started into our final papers and tests. We’re trying to fit everything in that we want to see before it’s all over. It’s not over yet, but it has gone by extremely fast. I love many of the people here.

Please pray that I continue in growth in God, as I have still been doing. Pray that I and the school still represent and glorify God in all that we do. Pray for the ICS team’s continued ministry in Bethlehem. Thank you all. I love you. You’re in my thoughts and prayers.