All Settled In

Greetings from Jerusalem!

That's right. I have returned to Jerusalem, Israel. Instead of learning as a student, this time around I will be learning as a teacher! I am very excited about the opportunity God has given me to be here.

I will post pictures later of the school, my apartment, and so on. Suffice to say now that I have moved into the apartment here. I have two roommates: Christopher and Hakeem. They seem like pretty cool guys, so I don't think we'll have any problems. Still gotta figure out all the washing dishes and cleaning stuff but we'll get to that later.

Yesterday we went to the small market here to buy food. I was happy to see that they had frozen pizzas and chicken and cereal! I will be experimenting with cooking here, although it's hard because most of the directions on the boxes are in Arabic. We'll see what great and terrible things I come up with!

Tomorrow we will be going to the school to set up our classrooms. I will see where the next year of my life will be spent! I'm looking forward to it.

All in all, I am excited about this new chapter in my life. It will be challenging, frustrating, and lonely at times, but I am hoping rewarding as well.

I also hope that this blog will serve as a way for my friends and family to keep up with some of the details of my life here that I may not be able to share via text messaging, skype, or whatever else. This means that the blog will be much more about my personal and communal life here than about anything academic, scholarly, or spiritual; although, I hope to include some of those as well.

If you pray, please pray that I will be able to jump right into life here. It is a very different experience than the last time I was here, so there will be culture shock. Most of all, pray that I will be able to show the same kind of love that Jesus Christ has shown me and all who follow Him.