Jerusalem Sunset

From the Beginning–ELP

One of the Most Beautiful Songs Ever!

Dear Into Israel Readers,

I was all set to go.  The bright blue day was gorgeous, not a cloud in the sky.  My teary farewell with my family was behind me when the captain on my plane in San Antonio interrupted my thoughts of Jerusalem, and told the passengers we weren’t going because there was a sizable storm stalled right over the Atlanta airport.

So back we went to the gate, and my sister came to fetch me.  The connecting flight to Israel had even been cancelled later that evening, so even if I had made it to Atlanta, I wasn’t set to go after all.

I finally left two days later, and now I am here—Home in Israel, writing to you once again after such a long delay that I apologize for.  I have to be in the zone to write, and there just wasn’t time or place in the whirlwind of my trip for me to get to that zone.

Indeed, I needed those two days to just be before I returned.  I had already said all my good-byes, had my bon voyage dinners, and was completely packed.  So I wandered my childhood home, shared quiet alone conversations with my parents, and stared out the window at the big sky, and thought and thought.

Dear Into Israel readers, I am here for only two months, and then I will be returning to Texas.  It is not that I don’t love Israel, you know better than that.  And for all the posts that I wrote to you about why I came, it was a calling.

There will probably never be a day in my remaining life that I won’t think about Israel, and my time spent here.  I will revisit each moment over and over again, recalling times thought long forgotten.

Had I the slightest thought I would be returning to the States, I would never have shipped my belongings, and even though the cost is high, they provided comfort and continuity.  Together we left, and together we will go back.

There is no way to write the words where I could adequately express what this past year has meant not just to me, but more importantly, for me.  A year ago I couldn’t even conceive that I could be writing this post to you.

I had a calling to come to Israel to become closer to God, and I am blessed I picked up the call.  I am still in many ways the same Barbara, and outwardly there may not appear a difference, but inwardly I have become me for the first time in my life.  I am so thankful for this.

We are all messengers of God.  Each of us has our own unique message to share with the World.  I knew before I came that my message from God is embodied in Persistence of Peace, the essay I have written about Life, about God, about Peace.

I also know now that Persistence of Peace was a work in progress, and that I was called upon to come here to live.   God knew it wouldn’t have been possible for me to experience this knowledge on a ten-day tour or a three-month summer abroad and what was needed, what was required, was for me to become an integrated part of Israel.  When I leave I will be leaving on my Israeli passport, and when I have completed Persistence of Peace, I will share it with you.

In many ways, these next two months will be very much like the two days I spent between flights.  We think we know so much, and we think we are the ones in complete control, and we think we are all set to where we see our lives headed, yet in the end God always reveals and surprises us with the actual truth.

Here, I thought all along that my beginning was my Aliyah.  And I see that it is only now after I have been in Eretz Yisrael for over a year that my beginning is just beginning.

I’m coming upon this serene setting in my neshama, and it is here that I realize I’ve always rushed ahead to write the storyline of my life in my movie where the lead actor cast by my imaginative mind and the lead actress playing my hidden heart acted out my directions.  Only till now, just now, I’m beginning to behold the pureness of each moment as my soul emerges as the rightful author to glimmer upon the intended story as it embraces the lives of others in our movie.

Shalom,

Barbara