February 10 Blog Post

We are still without WiFi in our apartment so I have to wait until I get to the Seminary to get online. Hopefully we will get WiFi this week. We continue to have a wonderful time here in Nazareth. Here are a few highlights of the past couple of days.


We walked down to the Souk (local market). In my last blog I had pictures of the empty streets, we it was not that way on Saturday.

People were extremely friendly and many wanted to have spiritual conversations. Almost all were Moslems, but very free and open to conversation. One shop keeper told me as he held up the Koran and the Bible, “People go to the mosques or they go to the churches, they read their holy books, but they are bad people. I believe that we must be good in our hearts.” When I responded about how Jesus enables us to be good in our hearts the man grabbed my hands together and said “God bless you!”

Along the way we met a very extroverted and animated guy named Azmi.

He made an incredibly sweet pastry ball filled with honey. When we took our order of pastries and sat down in an open air coffee stand to eat and drink coffee and tea, lots of people in the market came over to greet us. We chatted, laughed and drank coffee and tea for over an hour. Wonderful time!

Here is a view of Nazareth from outside our apartment

Went to the village of Tu’ran outside of Nazareth for a Friday evening service. The placed was packed about 100 people mostly young people. Pastor Saleem and his wife Endira were gracious and deeply spiritual people.

On Sunday we went to the Local Baptist Church of Nazareth. We will probably attend here often. Much larger crowd with a large number of professionals.

After church Bryson and May Arthur took us to Tiberias for lunch. We ate at a Chinese restaurant right on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Wow! Hard to eat just imagining the biblical stories that occurred right around us. We then drove to Capernaum to visit the area where Jesus spoke in the synagogue and where Peter’s mother-in-law lived. Here is a picture of Bryson, President of the Seminary and me in the synagogue.

Peter’s house

We have completed our first week in Israel. It has been a great week of settling in and adjusting. We plan to rent a car this next week and make a 2-3 day excursion around Upper Galilee.