Al & Josh's trip to Israel

Josh sent several pictures of their trip to Israel.  

 Sheepfold

A copy cat coffee house

Wilderness of Zinn

Moses struck the rock twice

En Gedi, where David hid from Saul

Masada

Dead Sea

Caesarea Maritime

Jerusalem Museum 

Oldest known fragment of a Biblical text

found on a silver scroll amulet

from time of 7th century B.C.

The Aaronic blessing, sometimes called the Father's Blessing

was written on this tiny scroll.

My father would pray this blessing over my children when they were young.

With archeologist, Dr. Gabi Barkay, who found this oldest Scripture.

They date 300 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls!

I was so excited that Allen brought back a necklace with this blessing on it!

An altar

Jesus traveled through Samaria

Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal

Jacob's well is deep within this church

Hezekiah's tunnel 

wilderness - Jesus was tempted somewhere around here

Start of the Jordan river

bethpage or pre-figs

 Ein Gev, looking over Sea of Galilee, where they stayed for part of their time

 Mustard seed

Entrance to burial spot of Abraham and Sarah.  Last time they sent someone down to explore it, they came back up because the place was crawling with snakes!  Sounds like Indiana Jones!

Jim and Al

Agora community center of Samaria.  

Phillip would have spoken to the people here.

Earthquake damage.

Only a few graves with the stone left

 It has been fun to go through the pictures.  Some of these places we went to last year, but some are new places.  If you wish to look at some more, check out Josh's flicker sight.  He is still working on loading these pictures - he took a LOT of photos!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/joshgraber/sets/72157644838006332/

Butterflies

The kids ordered a butterfly kit.

You can order these on-line.

They get caterpillars and watch them grow into butterflies!

They were quite tame!

But butterflies need the great outdoors and it was time to let them go.

 They each had 2 butterflies to set out.

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.  ~R.H. Heinlein

See what I mean about being tame?

May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun
And find your shoulder to light on,
To bring you luck, happiness and riches
Today, tomorrow and beyond.
~Irish Blessing

Send off

A couple of weeks ago, we drove down to Arkansas.

Papa sure loves to play with his grandkids!

The reason we went down was that Al and Josh were headed to Israel together.

We took pictures before going to the airport.

Emeri had gone to school so she wasn't able to come to the airport with us.

A great father/son time together!

 Last kisses for awhile!

 Good-bye for 2 weeks, guys!  We knew they were going to have a great study tour!

Staci,  Eli and I ran to Wal-mart.  I couldn't believe it but we ran into Kristin!!  They moved here from Kansas.  Kristin and Nate used to be in our young married's community life group from church.  How fun to see her again!

Staci and I had a project to complete.

We were going to paint their master bathroom!

Multi-tasking!

 We recruited my friend's daughter, who also has moved to NW Arkansas and goes to Josh's church!

Thank you so much, Andrea!

Isn't this so nice?!

The kids kept busy while we were painting in the 

little card table house I made for them.