Israel Team Update 1

Hi beloved ones,

about every week I will write an update that goes out to all my students families and friends so since I am already writing that for them I thought
I’d post the same updates here for all of you to read as well.
So here is our first update:

Hi friends and family,

We have been in Jerusalem for a week now.
So far it has been amazing. The team is getting along very well and everyone is really enjoying our time here.

Since we are in such a historical place it has been unavoidable for us to not see some of the sights in the Old City and doing that has been a lot of fun and a good team building experience. And this is really such a beautiful city!

Before we left we felt that our time in Jerusalem specifically would be marked with a lot of intercession and worship. This has come true since we live just a few blocks from a 24-7 prayer house (and on the other side of our home is the valley which Jesus referred to as Gehenna : )) so we have been going to the prayer house a lot. This place is very much in need of this due to all the tension politically and religiously.

We have also found out that people here, especially young people, are very open to talking to us about the Messiah which is very exciting. There is a part of the city which is more modern and where everyone goes to hang out in the evenings and we have been going here almost every night to talk to people and sing worship.

It has been really good and a lot of us have had many good conversations with people and we have been allowed to pray from some of them. I always expected that everyone here would be very educated in the scriptures but as we have been around here we have found it is not true. What they are being taught is more so teachings from different rabbis and not so much the scripture it self and there is even part of scripture that they are not allowed to read, like Isaiah 53 for example. So it gets very interesting when you bring things like that up when talking to people.

One of our first days here we got to love the poor by putting together food packages for about 600+ families. We spent about 6 or 7 hours straight, together with lots of other volunteers, packing vegetables into huge bags each one weighing about 30 pounds each. I have never seen so much food in one place at the same time. It was like packing up a whole grocery store into bags. Then the families came in the late afternoon and they all got to take two bags of food each.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that we got invited to go to a three day long New Age Festival at the end of this week. It is very expensive but we prayed for a few days about it as a team and we felt from God that two people should go and that those two would be me (Paulina) and Marissa. So we will be leaving on Thursday and stay at the festival until Saturday and the rest of the team will still be in Jerusalem continuing our work here. The festival is a very intense place with over 30 000 young people coming to seek spiritual experiences outside of Judaism. I have heard that people even come all the way from India to come to this three day event. We will not go alone but together with a group of believers that go to these things regularly. They say that this is the best event during the year to share with people about the Messiah. So we are very excited about this.

Please keep praying for all of us, we need it.

Shalom,

Paulina, Philip, Justine, Marissa, Karman, Sarah, Audrey, Lea and Alissa