It may not be #ThrowbackThursday but we’re gonna throw it back anyway! Let’s revisit this blog post on why you should visit Israel, done by Malcolm Cartier in 2012:

Surely, without travel or hassle I can be in the comfort of my own home with familiar surroundings enjoying all the benefits of my faith, of course you can, so why should you bother to visit the Holy Land?

Over the past generation of forty odd years, traversing the Promised Land and travel abroad, I have been privileged to hear preachers and teachers brilliantly expound the prophets and sages in His Land and at home. At home some conjure a picture in their minds eye and profoundly express to their audience their imaginative understanding about what happened in that mystical far off, almost mythological Holy Land, most artists did much the same. Expressing how Jesus might have felt in Galilean storms, spiritually in Gethsemane or his final hours dragged across Jerusalem through the crowds to the cross?

It’s time to raise the curtain on the biblical stage. It is almost small enough in size that it can be expressed in a cartoon fashion and held up as a map on a scale of 1:1, from Dan to Beersheba, a mere 150 miles and the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea approximates 40 miles. A petite land some distance away from home across the seas covered in sand and dust within the legendary myths of history. But that is not quite true as the Holy Land revitalized lives and thrives today within its contemporary populous. After you have sailed the sea, walked in Galilee, stood by the olive grove of Gethsemane and experienced the empty tomb, it is no longer just about telling of how they might have felt in yesteryear, but awakens a mind boggling illumination into a living personal relationship and reality with His Word, face to face with authenticity that your senses can see, hear, taste, touch and more. Returning home saying, when I was there as you recount and express a new dimension of your personal witness to where it all began.

The Holy Land, located around the navel of the world, is where three continents meet, Europe, Asia and Africa with something for all, interwoven into a most extraordinarily exquisite exotic mosaic of highways and byways, faith, culture, agriculture, food, climate and dress. It’s all within reach, enhancing the monochrome black and white pages of the biblical narrative that contagiously bursts into an unforgettable rainbow of color and meaning, which becomes eternally etched in your mind, the link between yesterday and today. The Word laced with time in memoriam enhanced with the personal unforgettable experience of a life time. Why imagine what can be a reality? The Holy Land welcomes your presence.

Malcolm Cartier