We spent our last day in Israel visiting the sites that are pillars of our Christian faith. Some of us mentioned that we came on the trip to experience what we saw today. The highlight of our morning journey was visiting Bethlehem and seeing where Jesus would have been born at the Church of the Nativity. We then drove back to Jerusalem and spent the afternoon visiting all of our sites on foot.

Within a five hour period we started at the Mount of Olives, had personal devotional time in the Garden of Gethsemane, heard a message from Rich at the pool of Bethesda, walked the road where Jesus would have carried the cross, saw Golgotha, and the tomb where Jesus was buried and resurrected. Talk about a full afternoon.

The thing I can’t wrap my mind around is that they are all within walking distance from each other. I always imagined that they would be so far apart. For example Jesus was buried less than 30 yards from where he was crucified.

As we finished our day of walking around the City of David we ended our night having a farwell dinner with our trusty tour guide Ronan and our hero of a bus driver Yegal. Two men that took us through the land and taught us so much about the culture. It was a very sad by happy goodbye knowing that they would get a chance to lead another group through the land to experience what we had. Tomorrow morning we wake up at 3am and head to Turkey. Pray for energy for our group. After today, we are going to need it!