“Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean…” – Deuteronomy 24:5

Unpacking in the new house – and we have talked about this before – always tends to take a long time because we keep finding stuff. It’s like an archaeological dig right there in a pile of cardboard boxes.

I uncovered these images in a small picture album in my parents’ stuff I had forgotten even existed. I was no kind of a photographer back in 1975. In fact all I had was one of those mini snapshot cameras with the film that produced slides the size of postage stamps! I didn’t take but one roll because all my film had been stolen from a campsite in Italy and I had literally no money to buy more.

So this (the picture above), was my first look at the Gulf of Aqaba; I remember it so clearly. We had arrived at a hostel late at night and a few of us took our sleeping bags and slept on the beach.

What strikes me today is the rawness of the experience. Sleeping on the beach; riding around on a kibbutz bus; eating a lot of bread and olives; no money to spend; as for souvenirs, my journal was my only keepsake!

And I knew so little about what we were seeing! I had just turned nineteen and had no idea about research and history and context and what was going on in the world. I just knew that I was somewhere incredibly special and that this was important.

Fortunately I was very much an observer at that point in my life. I took in everything around me and I listened intently to what people were saying and I had a keen sense of discernment; I was beginning to sort the wheat from the chaff, the substance from the nonsense, the faith from the snake oil.

And there was a lot I was exposed to on that trip that took all the discernment I could muster! We were less than one month and just six countries into our 20-plus nation 14-week trek, and I understood that I had to have my wits about me.

But there on the beach, sleeping in the open air with a ragtag group of pilgrims from a dozen nations, I had the sense that it could have been the time of Moses and things would have looked much the same, or we could have been a band of visitors heading up to Jerusalem around AD30, camped out on the beach a couple of days before we run into a Rabbi named Jesus.

But it was late April of 1975, almost exactly 50 years ago, and my memory is so clear that I can almost taste the dusty air and hear the lap of the waters on the ancient shoreline… and see my fellow travelers begin to stir at the start of a day that would take us from the beach to the fortress of Masada and more remarkable stories.

I am fairly sure I had bread and olives again for breakfast. And I didn’t feel like a tourist, I was a pilgrim; we all were. I’d like to think I still am one today… – DEREK