Time (is ticking away.. tick, tick, tickin' away...)

Less than three weeks left here. And only the first one and a half are going to be spent in Jerusalem. When you get this close to your time being up in a place you love, its kind of a frightening thing. There are so many (unknown) things that I wish I had done, and so much to do still. How can I fit it all in? Did I make the most of every day while I was here? probably not. How do I learn to deal with that, and remain content with what I did learn, and see, and do? Will I ever get the chance to come back? How is this time going to affect my daily life back home?
As you can see, there are a lot of questions in my mind at the moment.. that is just the beginning of them.

Yesterday was our last day at the Jerusalem school in Palestine (Bet Jalla) with our soccer girls. I knew that the time would come to leave them eventually, but it just came so fast. We spent 10+ weeks talking about the Bible and playing soccer with the same 7 girls, and only in the last couple of weeks did we feel as though we were finally getting to know who they really are. During those 10+ weeks, though, we had a lot of laughs; a lot of connections were made. I went in expecting to meet a lot of very Middle-Eastern girls, when in reality, most of them are from the US or Canada. They know what life is like outside of Palestine. They know the freedoms that I enjoy even here, as a U.S. citizen with 2 parents who are U.S. citizens. They feel trapped here, behind the wall that divides the West Bank from the rest of Palestine.

I am going to miss them so much. The girls there have helped me to see more of what life is like in the west bank, and I am grateful for that. Three of the girls are Muslim. They all attend a Christian school, though because it is the only school around that speaks English, and they don’t know Arabic enough to go to a public school. Although I knew that some students there were Muslim, I just found this out about my soccer girls toward the end. In some ways, I wish I would have known earlier—maybe I would have done things differently. Who knows? But if there is one thing the Lord has taught me in my life, it’s not to worry about what has already happened. He will get the glory for what good comes of it—it should be of no concern to me.

My only prayer is that they will grow in their knowledge of and faith in the Lord Jesus. They have a lot of teachers at their school who can be good role models for them, so I pray that they would cling to them and learn from them not only the school subjects, but also about life. So, seeing as it was our last day with the girls in Bet Jalla, Krystal (my roommate) and I decided to take them out to eat. We went to Mundo’s, an apparently popular place in Bethlehem. It was good food, and for once we were able to see those young ladies outside of a school setting. Of course, we also took a lot of fun pictures, like girls tend to do.

These next couple of weeks are going to be busy still, even though I have finished classes and all that remains is one final and one final paper. There is a lot with which we are planning to fill our time like going to Bethlehem for a day and cleaning/packing, as well as getting last minute souvenirs. haha.
Well, after putting up 350 pictures on facebook, and writing a blog entry, I think it is about time to start thinking about literacy in ancient Israel, social norms, and the clothes of the priests as described in Exodus: gotta start digging away at the Cultural Backgrounds Final paper.