From Ugly to Beautiful

In as long as it takes you to read this, you will see how beautiful this land really is.

When I first started this trip, I cursed every step and every time I heard the words "sun" and "up." Not so much anymore...WHY you ask? Well, I realized, while looking at the Nahal Zin (an ugly brown hunk of nothing), that God made this land for a purpose. I do not know why, but I know that because He made it, it must be good (as it says in Genesis). How can I impart beauty or favored status on something that is not mine...I can't!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This saying is coming to life for me. I am beginning to see the land between as a place of majestic beauty with diverse and variey attributes. For instance, the Biblical Negev is a wasteland or hell on Earth in most people's eyes. I now see it as the land that sustained Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and many others. It is also the land where God made His covenant with the newly freed Israelites...though they wandered it for forty years, He provided for them.

Another example is Masada. I thought that I was not going to be able to climb that sucker and was dreading it for a week. Yet why should I let the lay of the land get in the way of my faith in God? I shouldn't! This land is a journey of faith in and of itself. I have had to have faith in God and others to help me survive parts of it, and He and they came through!

So, I would like to pose the question...when does something go from being ugly to being beautiful??? The answer is just the other side of a change in perspective! Try it...it is working for me!