Focus On Jesus
Could
going there have a similar
effect on Kristin and re-focus her on Jesus and His healing?
When I tabled the idea of visiting Israel to Kristin, her eyes lit up. If I took her there, will she promise to focus on Jesus and not on marriage? She said yes. Will she promise to not even mention marriage during the trip? She said yes. Was she sure? She said she was sure.
So we prayed, stashed most of our belongings in a storage locker in the capital city of that southeast Asian country, flew to Tel Aviv, then took a minibus to Jerusalem, and checked into a small Airbnb just west of the Old City that had a bedroom for her and a pull out couch bed for me just outside of it.
The first place I took her to was the tomb of Jesus' resurrection, inside which we spent a good hour praying and reading the Bible. Given what is recorded in Acts 19:11-12 - "Now God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out of them" - I hoped that all demons will just leave Kristin when she touches the tomb, but nothing of the sort happened. In fact, her reaction was more muted than my own reaction during my first trip to the tomb. But she still liked the tomb and even asked its Anglican director about the possibility of working at the tomb. He explained that all of his staff are unpaid volunteers who work twelve hours per day, six days a week in exchange for a free bed, and there is a months-long waitlist. The donations box at the entrance of the tomb was full of money and the gift shop was doing brisk business, so the money was going to someone other than those who labor at the tomb, but we still returned to the tomb many times during our stay.
We also visited the Wailing Wall, took a taxi to the top of the Mount of Olives, walked down to the Garden of Gethsemane, crossed the Kidron Valley, and trudged through Hezekiah's Tunnel. The Jews were more receptive to the Gospel than during my previous visit a decade prior. But when we handed out the Gospel tracts that Kristin had translated into Hebrew, the orthodox Jews we met tried to shut us down except during the Sabbath, when they couldn't do their 'work' of chasing down Christians.
One afternoon, when Kristin and I were sitting on the bleachers in the Garden Tomb compound that faces Golgotha, she - I believe the protector alter - said to me that she wanted marriage. When I reminded her that she had promised to focus on Jesus and not even mention marriage during this trip, she said it's my fault because I had brought her to "the land of strollers." When I asked her what she meant, she asked me if I hadn't noticed how many women in Jerusalem were pushing babies around in strollers. Come to think of it, there were quite a few women pushing babies in strollers as Israel did have a high birth rate. She said seeing them had worn her down, so she wanted marriage and her own baby to push around in a stroller. I asked her how she can face the place where Jesus sacrificed His life to save her, and still call this "the land of strollers" instead of the land of her Savior; I told her to repent and focus on Jesus and what He has done for her to grant her everlasting life in heaven instead of on her fleshly needs on earth.