Today helped put a name to a feeling. This feeling is unsettling, but generative. The feeling is the state of being interrupted.

We began the morning outside Bethlehem, at the Cremisan Winery. As a group we stood in a modest but inviting tasting room, at a winery founded in 1885. We sipped an excellent red wine, the result of a 1500-year-old indigenous Palestinian grape. We savored the rich and lingering taste, as well as the slightly transgressive thrill of a morning tasting. We drifted out onto a grassy gathering space overlooking typically gorgeous mountains. And, we heard a familiar story narrated onto the landscape: the story of illegal settlements progressively encroaching and Israeli walls that will annex land and further restrict Palestinian movement. Interruption.

Hours later, on the road from Nablus to Zababdeh, before passing through the richest agricultural land I have yet seen here, we snaked up a steep road. From the top we were directed to look left (that is, west). Only 40 kilometers in the distance the sun gleamed off the Tel Aviv skyline and the Mediterranean Sea just beyond. The clear and undisturbed view begged to come and swim. And, then it dawned on me that this invitation is closed for nearly every Palestinian nearly all of the time. An intentionally disorienting bureaucratic infrastructure makes the invitation something more like a mirage. Interruption.

How best can we listen amid this state of interruption? This question is really a prayer. God, will you bless us all to have listening ears, observant eyes, discerning minds, and patient hearts?

~ James Bielo