This past Sunday evening at Park Church, Abigail Ozanne, shared some pictures and stories of her time in Palestine with a Christian Peacemakers team. She focused on the Hebron area and told about how hard it is to do even basic daily travel and the tensions created in common life with the Israeli presence of soldiers or settlers. I loved what she described as the "Grandmother effect." Sometimes knowing that someone is there watching you can change the situation. I heard again that it is the extremism that forces the issues that others are trying to resolve. She added another layer of images into the stories I hear from one of our Brainerd residents who has relatives in the Bethlehem area. When I was in"the Holy Land" back in March of 2001 (compliments of a great Knights Templar program) we were very limited in the formal conversations about Palestinians. Something was being hidden from us. But it could not be hidden. Being in a land I had always wanted to see, even with all the richness of that experience, I came back with a heaviness that there was something deeply unholy happening in the Holy land.
Check out the Christian peacemakers web site at www.cpt.org and click on the project sites for Hebron/West Bank