Hello again, after an interlude of several years! I am now retired with a lot of time in my hands and guess what? I am blogging again!

Recently, as in last week, I was on a HIGHER PLANE 2023 tour to Israel with Pastor  Elsie Obed and the Worship His Majesty King Jesus team in Jerusalem, from 29 May to 5 June 2023, and what an unforgettable and memorable time I had! In order to help me retain the memorable encounters, I have tried to record them as best as I can. In the next few blogs, I want to share them with you for two main reasons, first to inspire you and second to encourage you to visit Israel, if you have not yet done so. This first blog tells you about my pathway to Israel. Happy reading! 

...............................................................

"They say that you should be careful what you say or ask for. Well, this applies to my former thoughts about going to Israel. In previous years, the thought of going to Israel had the connotations of a pilgrimage to me and stories from pilgrims who had gone did not help my lack of interest to go to the Holy Land. Stories of shrines, pilgrims with lighted candles, kissing statues and images and in some cases, the floor/ground, holy water etc. was to me the performance of rituals I am not ready to embark upon. So to go to Israel at that time, would have been a matter of curiosity for me, to see what it is like and to prove that one did not need to go there to encounter God. So Israel was put on the back burner and it did not make my bucket list, after all, God can be found anywhere and everywhere!

Several years later, and several years wiser, I began to desire to go to Israel, in particular to the places where Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, conducted his ministry, died, resurrected and the place of His second coming. A lot is written in the Holy Bible about Jerusalem and in Psalms 137:5-6 we read: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy”!  The more I read the Holy Bible, the more I began to desire to connect with my Biblical roots. My first attempt to go to Israel was in 2017, and that was unsuccessful. My second attempt was in 2022, and that was also unsuccessful. I will not bore you with the details of those two episodes, suffice it to say that I was not happy with either outcomes. It did cross my mind that perhaps my earlier disinterest in going to Israel was at play here!

This brings me to 2023 and Kansas City, USA. I am here visiting my younger daughter and her family, when the opportunity to go to Israel came up once again. I greeted the news with trepidation and muted excitement, reminiscing the first two failed attempts. Cautiously, I went about finding out information on the tour from the organisers, Lilies International Christian Outreach, Hewlett, New York. If I was ever going to make it to Israel, I needed a visa for starters and if your passport is not one of the powerful passports in the world, the process to apply for any visa at all is a daunting task, believe me. With all that in mind, I started putting together the visa requirements and immediately encountered a problem. The travel health insurance required was one that covered COVID-19, remember the pandemic that altered our way of life for a season, with lingering effects? Well, yes, I needed travel health insurance that covered that. The dilemma was that because I am not a US citizen, I was not eligible for a travel health insurance from a US company, so I was told by the numerous companies I called. You remember that I told you that I had tried twice before to go to Israel? Well, on one of those occasions, I got a travel health insurance from a company in my home country, The Gambia, so it was just a matter of getting in touch with them to issue a new insurance. With all the requirements in hand, I travelled to New York for the visa interview on 14^th May 2023 and to my great delight, I was granted the visa. ‘Israel, here I come’!

I had arranged for the original travel health insurance to be sent to me in Kansas City and we found a dear brother coming to USA who brought it for me. Since I needed to travel with it to Israel, I told him to post it by courier, but we settled for United States Postal Services instead, because he was assured that the document will get to me in a couple of days from posting it. We had a tracking number. All good. Come the expiration of the couple of days on 17^th May 2023, no mail had arrived. I started tracking the mail and saw that it had arrived at the Kansas State sorting depot two days after the day it was posted on 15^th May 2023. For the next seven days, the document was ‘going through the postal system, on track to be delivered on schedule’! By 24^th May, I had 2 days left before my travel since I was taking a 6am flight out of Kansas City on 27^th May, and I was getting concerned that the letter had not arrived. I went to a nearby post office to find out what was causing the delay. They promised to help, but by the next day still no mail. In the early hours of 26^th May 2023, I prayed to God to remove obstacles to the delivery of my mail. I went to bed and about 6 hours later, in the morning of the same day, I went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, and there on the table was the letter! Apparently, it came in the evening of the previous day, after we had collected the mails for the day. My joy was palpable!

Fast forward to Monday 29 May 2023, and I am in a Boeing aircraft along with 2 brothers from the Kings Temple, Hewlett, NY, also on the Israel tour, flying from Newark Liberty International Airport, NJ, and about to land at Ben-Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel!

My preparations for travel to Israel was on the spiritual level as well. My older daughter, Ame, who was on the trip, as well as my sister Angela and her husband Lee, challenged ourselves to read the gospels all over again to refresh our memories on the stories, events and locations we were about to see while in Israel. In addition, I watched several episodes of different Holy Land tours on TV, but nothing prepared me for what I was about to experience!

We landed around 6pm Israeli time and at after security and customs we took a 45 minute drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I noticed fields of fruit and vegetables and that olives trees seemed to grow everywhere. The landscape was interesting and sometime breathtaking with hills and valleys and houses literally perched on the edge of cliffs. It was a smooth ride, not much traffic delay and we got to our hotel, Prima Park, where other members of the group were waiting. We checked in and had dinner. After dinner, Pastor Elsie Obed, Founder of Lilies International Christian Outreach (LICO), organiser of the tour and Group leader, welcomed us warmly and proceeded to give us insights into HIGHER PLANE 2023, which was the theme for Worship His Majesty King Jesus (WHMKJ), Jerusalem 2023. She said, in summary, that her desire is that the experiences we will gather from the tour will usher us into walking on a higher plane with God. She encouraged us to focus on the spiritual aspects of the tour in order to gain maximum benefit from it. We were all excited and could not wait for the next day to start the tour".

See you tomorrow for Day One of the tour. Excited? I am even as I am writing....