Home on the Range

Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been so long since we last blogged…

Adjusting back home from Israel took a while for us and the kids. We stayed at good friends’ of ours the entire time at home while our place is rented out for the summer. For the first 4 days we were on a nice routine of waking up at 4:00AM - we were amazed at everything we could get done before seven! But day by day we slowly returned to normal time. We really missed Israel but at the same time we were glad to be back in Langley. We’re still amazed at how versatile the kids have been without a regular schedule. Reese and Carter were so excited to be back in our car again but haven’t even batted an eye at the fact that they’ve been out of their beds for over 2 months now.

Our two and a half weeks in Langley were full and fun. Jeff took a Regent College class down on UBC campus for one of the weeks. He enjoyed an indepth look into the book of 2 Timothy - but didn't enjoy the hour and 20 minute commute - each way. Beyond that we filled our time with tons of post & pre trip errands and reconnecting with good friends and family. Shawn & Kimberley (Michelle's brother & wife) and girls came for a short visit, Michelle's good friend Adrianne & her cute new baby Elsa came for a week as well as Lynae which allowed for a short girls reunion. We visited the water park, biked the sea wall, Michelle did some much anticipated garage sale-ing. We visited Cultus Lake and made numerous walks around Fort Langley. It was perfect. After all the Israel laundry finally got washed we packed it all up again for the last portion of our sabbatical. Thanks to generous family friends sharing their condo with us we are able to spend a month resting in sunny Palm Springs.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated with our California adventures!

Planes, buses, and camel rides

We all woke up on our last day feeling, as Reese described it, “happy sad”. We were really happy to come home to see friends, breathe fresh air, eat a peanut butter sandwich (Reese), and drink a cold glass of milk. But we were sad to say good-bye to new friends we made, to a city so full of history and vitality, to amazing hospitality, and to this adventurous chapter on our life.

We woke up & had our last interesting Israeli breakfast - hotdogs, salami sandwich and all - picked up our last few souvenirs, and headed to the Wailing Wall one last time. One thing our sight seeing to-do list still had on it was a family camel ride, and being that our flight wasn’t leaving until the evening we made our way back out to the Negev desert. There we found a Bedouin family who lives somewhat nomadic and rents their family camel out for short rides to tourists like us (we ride while he leads the camel, although it would have been fun to go off by ourselves!). Reese was excited at the hotel but we were unsure how she would really do. Camels are such big animals & we though she might get a bit intimidated. But just like all the other challenges we have put before her she rose the occasion and had a blast. Camel rides are not much different to a lazy horse ride, except the beginning. Once you have gotten on the camel the tricky part is when it stands up. Because their legs are so long and they stand up with their hind legs first, you feel like your going to faceplant into the camel’s neck. While Reese was loving it, Michelle was screaming for their lives! But they made it, and once they were up it was a pretty cool ride. Carter was watching intently, and the guy invited him for a ride as well. Jeff asked him, and he lit up and said, “Ya!”. So Jeff and Carter gave it a go, and he totally loved it (Jeff almost dropped him but we don’t need to talk about that).

No task is too small or boring for the Renauds, including our ride to the airport. Having no roof rack or trailer we had to fit everything into our rental car. The ‘everything’ included a double-stroller, 2 70-80 liter backpacks, a suitcase, a large duffel bag, a playpen, 6 carry-ons, 2 children in their carseats, and Jeff and Michelle. We made it with thankfully no cops to pass. With little delays at a VERY intense security at the airport, we headed off to London.

We arrived into London late and planned to stay over and spend the day in the city sightseeing before catching our next plan around dinner time. Well, we woke up the next morning to read that London was going to have more rain that day than they usually do in an entire month! So we ditched Big Ben and the London Bridge for the playroom at the hotel (lame, we know) before heading back to the airport. To put it mildly, our flight home was a gong show with British Airways, from a multiple-hour delay (on the plane) to being the only ones whose video screens didn’t work to losing our stroller. But the kids slept 6 of the 9 hours, so that made up for it!

We’re back in Langley now, staying at the Price’s as our place is rented out until September. 4:30am has become the new wakeup time for everyone as we fight through jet lag, but we’re all doing well and enjoying being home for the next 2 ½ weeks. Jeff’s class at Regent begins on Monday for a week and other than that we have got little going on but catching up with good friends and playing at the park.

Thank you all for your prayers while we were away, it really was an amazing experience and one we will never forget. The kids were right with us with everything and did so well. In fact, Reese is already talking about going back (for her honeymoon with her friend Isaiah she said for some reason), and we can’t wait to go back as well. For anyone who has even the slightest possibility to go, we cannot recommend it enough – it gets into your heart!

Sunny Days

We began our last full day driving west from Jerusalem on the hunt for the Elah Valley. This is where the epic battle of David and Goliath took place. It isn't marked with a museum or any type of tourist attraction, but that is part of what made this visit so interesting. The brook of Elah, which lies in the heart of the valley, is a seasonal creek that runs dry in the summer months. Most probably the brook from which David chose five smooth stones in preparation for battle, it was an ideal place to reminisce about what is arguably one of the most famous story from the Bible. After doing some offroading to find the site we spent some time as a family picking stones & reading the events in our Bible. We were saying that this story often is almost thought of as a children’s fable or some sort of folk lore, but it is a true story showing the power of our Lord for the underdog. The story takes on a whole new dimension when you read it from the site of the action.

We then headed off to Tel Aviv to enjoy an afternoon in the Mediterranean. It was amazing! We felt so relaxed enjoying the scenery, the sun, the amazing sand beaches, the blue water and the occasional popcycle. Reese was quite happy with the level of saltiness in the Mediterranean compared to our day at the Dead Sea! Both the kids had a blast playing in the water and digging in the sand. Neither of them have had much experience with sandy beaches, so they kept themselves very busy building and digging and throwing. Carter did load quite a few handfuls of sand on neighboring suntanners! We think it was his way of hitting on some of the girls. Beyond building and digging we even had the unexpected chance to observe some marine life, which was particularly exciting for Reese and Carter. Numerous times while swimming or sitting in the water we were stung by jelly fish. They were just mild ones, so we didn’t think much of it. Well, later in the afternoon people came across a HUGE jelly fish – I am sure it was bigger than Lewis, that washed up onto the shore only 25 feet from us. It was still alive so some locals placed back in the water VERY FAR from us. Not even five minutes later another one washed up on shore even closer to us. For some reason we didn’t spend too much time in the water after that.
We drove home quite peacefully, each of us a little shade of pink, but all having had a really cool time.

Yad Vashem

One of the hardest days by far was our trip to Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Museum (this was done during Jeff’s class but Michelle has been before, and we didn’t want to and weren’t allowed to bring the kids in). We were there for just over three hours, and the time did not allow us to take in all that the museum offered. We’ve seen movies and heard stories of how the Jews were persecuted in horrific ways, and the museum did a really great job at giving an unbiased look into not only the Jewish people as a whole who were permanently affected but also individual families and the hardship they went through. The day really wrecks you but it’s one of those things you have to see.

Hitler writes in his book Mein Kampf, “The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.” It was with this personal ideology that Hitler came to power and swayed the Nazi party to also adopted this twisted mindset. Once they gained power under a number of circumstances they took away democracy, instituted absolute power, and also began to discriminate against the Jews. It first began as a National Boycott Day in 1933, where every non-Jew was urged to not purchase anything from Jewish businesses. It was only six days later that they put the “Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service” into effect, allowing civil services to fire any Jewish person for any reason they wanted. Doctors were fired, lawyers lost their clients, teachers were randomly dismissed. The anti-Semitism continued to the point where years later, when World War II began, Hitler and the Nazi party instituted “The Final Solution”, allowing for full-blown removal of Jewish people from society and placed into city ghettos before being moved to concentration camps. From there most of us know the horrors that took place before those camps were finally liberated six long years later.

This was a shocking experience for a few reasons. One is the depth of depravity and hatred man, one party, almost an entire nation could feel. Many of the images were simply too hard to view, some videos too hard to watch. To think that this is part of our human history is shameful to think. And to think that there were so few non-Jewish people who stood up to denounce or put an end to the tragedy is deplorable as well.

But there is something else that we cannot seem to fathom, and that is what the response was from the outside church and world. Granted, no one really knew the scope of the atrocities taking place, but what was the response of the rest of the world? One country said, “there is not a Jewish problem in our country, and we prefer to keep it that way.” Many others said that the ‘conflict’ between the Nazi party and the Jewish people was an internal matter and it should be left as that. When 939 Jewish people sailed from Germany and tried to land in Cuba and the US, they were turned away because of ‘lack of proper visas’. They were forced to turn back and only at the last minute did England take some of them in briefly. And the response of the church? The Vatican took a formal stance of neutrality throughout the entire time, with no desire to ‘meddle into someone else’s affairs’. They only lightly scolded the Nazi party for their actions over the time. The German and surrounding churches tried to find ways of working with the Nazis, signing agreements and taking very much a pacifist role as well. So many kept silent in a time and situation where that option seems unfathomable.
Granted, this is a pretty heavy post. But again, this is part of the Jewish history and in a very real way, our history, so we must take note once again of what took place. The vast majority of Jewish people are not looking for pity; they do want what most of us take for granted – enjoy freedom in living, working, doing as they wish. At the end of the museum visitors are urged to ‘never forget’ the tragedy took place so as to not allow history to repeat itself. May we never indeed

We did take the kids to Oscar Schindler’s grave which is right here in Jerusalem (he wanted to be buried here). It was a good chance to pay respects to the man who helped save over 1200 Jewish people, and even though the kids didn’t understand fully why we were there, they did put a rock on his grave out of respect (Jewish custom) and we talked about what he did.

The Beginning and the End

Today we ventured out in our car to Bethlehem. We didn't realize how difficult it was going to be. Bethlehem is only about a 20 minute drive outside of Jerusalem, but making it difficult was a number of checkpoints as well as the ‘Fence’ as the Israeli army calls it – really it is an 8- metre wall – twice as high as the Berlin wall!). The Fence was built about three years ago to divide the Palestinian area from the Israeli. As we approach the heavily guarded checkpoint you can’t help feel a wee bit nervous even though Israel is safer now than has been for a long, long time. Jeff played it calm and cool, rolling the window down and yelling, “we’re Canadian!” before the guard even said anything, and Michelle sat back and was smirkey for some strange reason as she does whenever we get into these situations. Sometime soon her smirk is going to land us in a lot of trouble! We tried to get in but were turned away the first time because we are not allowed to bring car rentals into the area. We were thinking of how we could sneak across (just kidding) when a taxi driver offered to take us across and to the church. It was all good, and the price we agreed upon was half of what he was asking, but somehow we got fandangled into paying for a tour guide for Bethlehem as well. Oh well, at least we didn’t get shot at! (It really is amazing how many people here have guns and how much you see them on a daily basis. Guards at these checkpoints often stand there with one hand on the trigger, and some of them don’t look too happy. And then are some who look like they’re 15, but they still have a gun!).

In Bethlehem we went into The Church of the Nativity, the place where tradition and scholars agree where the birth of Jesus took place. There are actually three churches who share the spot as they all want a piece of the action, so it is quite a massive site. Once inside we made our way down to the manger area to the place of Jesus’ birth. And it is nothing like you picture in your mind. It is VERY crowded (it’s surprising how pushy fellow pilgrimmers can be), there is incense everywhere, there is rock everywhere, and it is in the basement of the church. Surprisingly there is no quiet barn, no hay with livestock snacking, and no wooden manger around! But despite the chaos and the contrast of reality with your mind’s eye of the place, there is still something very extraordinary about the place, a sense of wonder that this was where the Saviour of the world was born. Reese enjoyed it, but Carter was having too much fun being whisked around by our guide to care much. The free babysitting made it worth the price!

Next stop was the Herodian, which is a part natural, part man-made semi-mountain just south of Bethlehem. King Herod built this partially as a summer getaway palace where he could wine and dine with his friends, but also as a retreat place in case things turned against him in a time of revolt. We climbed up and like a lot of places around here, we were amazed at the history & the grandness of something made so many years ago. Still so much of it is intact. So we wandered through Herod’s private baths, climbed down through the mountain to the remains of water cisterns & walked through his place of worship.
It was awesome. As we left you can walk the perimeter of this mountain & have a view of Bethlehem to north, the Negev to the south & the Dead to the west. It was a great day. After supper we headed back to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This is the site of Jesus’ death & resurrection. It was quiet in the usually-packed church so we had the opportunity to sit & reflect for a little while at three major places within the church – the place of crucifixion, the stone where Jesus’ body was laid and anointed for burial, and the tomb. Just like the Nativity, the scene before you is nothing like you’d think it would be. But it doesn’t take away the magnitude of the moment. To be at the place of the turning point of history, especially inside the tomb where Jesus would have been laid to rest and then raised from the dead, was humbling and incredible.

God came down in human flesh to live and walk among us. And in perfect time he chose the way of suffering, dying a brutal death on a cross, only to show the world that death could not keep him and raising to life. All because of his great love for us. We stopped to be thankful many times today.

** As we walked through the Old City we ran into a few soldiers that Carter was enthralled with. It must be a boy thing.

Bar'am Village

This trip has really made a lot of impressions on us in many ways; sometimes it’s in people we meet, sometimes it’s in learning more about places we visit. The latter is true as Jeff visited a place called Bar’Am. Bar’Am was a village of Palestinian Christians located in the north, very close to Lebanon. It existed peacefully for generation upon generation, and in fact they lived that way right beside a Jewish village the entire time with both sides respecting each other. It was a quiet, unassuming village that had absolutely no violent past in any way.

That all changed in 1948. As Israel gained occupation of the land one of the first things they did was enter the village. People there took soldiers in and fed them and gave them housing, welcoming them in as one of their own. The soldiers soon asked them to leave, telling them that they were not safe in their own homes because of the violence that was taking place with the war around them. As they were escorted out, days later the Israeli Defense Force ordered the bombing of the entire village. Upon hearing what happened, the villagers tried to return home, only to be refused entrance. The same soldiers they took in were now pointing a gun at them telling them to stay away. They complained through the proper channels, telling the authorities that they just wanted their land back. The Supreme Court listened and agreed, but even though that ruling was made the Israeli army has ignored it and not allowed them back in. Israel says it is for defense purposes, the villagers feel it is discrimination. Regardless, these people have now had to resettle in other places, and they are only allowed to return to the village to bury their dead and that is all.

We share this not to say we pick sides in any of the ongoing conflict between Israelis and the Palestinians. The issues are way deeper than we can understand and we cannot in our naïveté simplify it to one or two things. But we will say this – for whatever reason – through media and other means we felt like before coming here we tended to side with the Israelis in this conflict. We see a lot of images of terror attacks that are obviously horrible and inhumane and see Palestinians responsible for that and tend to think a lot more are that way. But there are two sides to every story and Israel is not without guilt. Scholars say that Israel is ‘the abused child who has now become the abuser’. We have spoken to many Palestinian people – and Jewish people too – who are incredibly friendly, hospitable, and welcoming of us in every way. One Palestinian mentioned the other day that he ‘simply wanted a place to live in freedom too, like everyone else’, and he knows that cannot happen in the state things are in today. For this many Palestinians call the Israeli occupation “The tragedy”. They simply want freedom, which is also the only thing so many Jewish people want as well.

Again, we have not taken any sides, but it is a reminder that true peace is not the absence of war and conflict, it is in finding a resolution that allows people to respect each other in their differences and cultural identity. We are reminded that Psalm 122:6 is as real today as it was when it was written, and that is to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

[the added pictures are of some of the only surviving buildings in the village]

A Tale of Two Waters

Today was super fun! We woke up early & headed to the Dead Sea in our rental car (Michelle has to do all the driving because silly Jeff forgot his drivers license – Jeff is sure all the Arab men think he is a fancy boy for letting his wife do all the driving!) Before heading to the Holy Land you could ask Reese what she was going to do in Israel & she would say ‘Float in the dead sea with Wynonna’ (her favorite baby doll). We were all filled with such anticipation! Well… For all those who have floated in the salty sea will relate to Reese. Having both experienced the sea before Jeff & Michelle were prepared for the burning & pain you experience upon entering, but hoped that their children would be spared the agony. Reese entered the water with such high hopes. She sat down & before we knew it the first words out of her mouth were that she needed some of Carter’s diaper rash cream because her bum was burning. About 25 second later Reese was out of the water & no amount of fresh water could lift her VERY sad spirits. Despite her chagrin the rest of the Renauds enjoyed themselves immensely.

We left the 40 degree dessert & headed 15 minutes up the road to En Gedi. En Gedi is an oasis in the very hot Negev dessert. The story behind En Gedi can be found in 1 Samuel. This is the area that David hid out while being pursued by King Saul. Here it says that Saul actually went into a cave to go to the bathroom, and while he was there David cut a corner of Saul’s cloak to show him that he could have killed him but didn’t. Many of David’s Psalms were written here. It became our place of rest for the afternoon. After a hot climb through dry rocky ground fresh water waterfalls suddenly appeared. You really felt like you have found your own little piece of paradise. We spent two solid hours swimming, playing & chasing tad poles. It was amazing (except for a minor incident of Carter pooping in the water - what a way to bring you back to reality)! There’s never a dull moment when you are a parent. All in all it was a very memorable day.

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day everyone! We’ve really enjoyed our day here. There were no parades, no fireworks (maybe that’s a good thing?), no Canadian flags flying everywhere, but we still had a great day. It was a fun day in two ways: it was Jeff’s first day being finished his class (which was amazing and there’ll be more blogs to come about it), and since we already celebrated Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the kids thought it would be fun to have Kid’s Day, where we did things that were fun for Reese and Carter (it was actually more Reese’s idea, but Carter had no problems going along with it). It was supposed to be for the kids, but mom and dad had a pretty good time too.

The highlight of our day was doing Hezekiah’s tunnel again. Reese loved it so much the first time that she’s been looking forward to do it again more than almost anything else and has talked about it a lot. Well today was the big day! We traveled through the ½ kilometer tunnel with our headlamps on, with Reese walking and leading the entire way. And Carter walked most of it too! He had a blast walking around, sticking his hands in the water and on the walls then licking them. It took a bit longer but it was a blast, and we remembered our cameras this time for some fun pictures. For a child who’s generally a bit more on the reserved side of things we were surprised to see Reese’s spunk going through. She and Carter were soaking wet, tired, but loved every minute of it. And at the end we were greeted by about eight 10-year old Palestinian boys swimming around in their tighty whities! It wasn’t quite the greeting we expected.

After exiting the tunnel you see what is known as the Pool of Siloam. This where the Biblical story, in John 9, where Jesus heals the blind man with nothing more than dirt and spit; which made the story more memorable for our children!

We grabbed lunch at Carter and Reese’s favourite hot dog/burger place, then spent the rest of the day watching some good ole’ Mr. Dressup, giving shoulder rides around the Old City, and even having ice cream cake for dessert at the hotel. Are we nice parents or what? (just kidding).

Every day has truly been so much fun here, but it’s hard to believe we only have a week left here. We are excited to come home but already are starting to miss things here. The people here at the hotel and around the Old City have been so good to us. The class at JUC was so rich and full, and we’ve made great memories. This last week will be busy as we travel around to some of the sites we haven’t taken in yet and generally just enjoy time hanging out together. Everyone has been healthy, sleeping well, and getting by in the heat with the help of ice cream and air conditioning. We are truly blessed to be able to be here and are thankful for this place so much. Happy Canada Day to you all, as we take time to also celebrate our amazing country at home!

And a HUGE Happy Birthday to Kimberley!