Sunday, May 29.  This morning after breakfast, we left Mar Elias School in Ibillin to head through the Hills of Galilee towards the Sea of Galilee. A day of seeing places where Jesus began his ministry. To see hills he saw, to walk where he walked.

Those of us who had read Blood Brothers knew the story of Abuna (i.e. Father) Chacour. Even so, our first stop at Bir’am, where he was born, and where he spent his carefree childhood, had a heavy impact. We have being seeing many ruins during our time here. At each place, I would imagine the people and what their lives were like back then. These ruins today came at me differently. I was a boy playing in rural Oregon in 1948, roaming the hills behind where we lived, much like Abuna describes playing with the other boys in his village of Bir’am. My happy boyhood continued. His changed abruptly when the Zionist army arrived, expelling the whole village, saying it would be temporary. But then the village was mined, and an air attack turned it into the rubble we walked through today. We stood within the walls of Abuna’s cousin’s house. Abuna’s house shared the south wall. The floor we were on was covered with dirt and stones. A large tree grew in half of the room. We were told that the tile floor was still hidden under the protection of the dirt we stood on. A family gone. A village gone.

If I may, Steve, I would like to share the poem you composed as we were leaving.

Beauty buried,
While a wild fig tree of life
Grows in the rubble of death.

Later Joan led us in worship there in Bir’am. She asked each of us where we had seen Jesus during our week here. Everyone spoke. No one said a church, or a place, but a person, a relationship, an encounter. As Abuna would say, each saw Jesus in a Living Stone.

What a blessed life I have had. I pray God will continue to flow blessing on all Palestinians, especially those we have met, and whose stories we have heard. And also to give us courage to repeat those stories.

~ Phil Dean