BRP 230518 A Family Trip to the Holy Land, Part 1
Samantha Keller: Barbara Rainey describes the way many Westerners view the life of Jesus.

Barbara Rainey: It was so long ago and it was so far away that we tend to think of it as a fairy tale in some ways. And yet to go there and to see these places, many of them, that are unchanged since He walked the earth, it makes it real, and you realize it was real. Even if you know it in your head, there’s something about the reality of touching it and seeing it that brings it to life.
Samantha: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home, where we’re dedicated to helping you experience God, both inside and outside your home. Thanks for listening!

One of the challenges faced by any Christian parent is that of helping their children understand and believe that the Bible is true. Sometimes the cultural and geographical differences between our own place and time, and what we read about in the Old and New Testament can get in the way. I mean, let’s face it: there’s a world of difference between Jackson Hole and Jericho. Modern Columbus is a far cry from ancient Capernaum.

And yet we do believe God’s word is true. Each event described happened in a real context.

God recognizes that need for us to have tangible reminders and ways to prompt family discussions. His emphasis behind things like observing the Passover or putting up a pile of rocks was to help future generations know what actually happened. He wants families to talk about, to remember, the amazing things He’s done.

Well, there are a lot of ways a family in, say, Kokomo or Juneau or Honolulu can help bring the Bible to life. Dennis and Barbara Rainey are here today to talk about one way they’ve done it. Let’s listen to Part One of their reflections on their recent trip to the Holy Land.

Dennis Rainey: And welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home. We’re glad you’ve joined us today. I’m seated across the desk here from my lovely bride, Barbara. Welcome, sweetheart. It’s good to be with you.

Barbara: Thanks. It is good, it’s always good.

Dennis: We just had a little trip that represented some of our values that we wanted to share with our listeners. You want to tell them about where this idea came from?

Barbara: Well, for a long time, Dennis and I have talked about taking our kids to Israel. The idea really came from some of the values that he and I have tried to implement with our kids all the way back to when we were raising them. One of our top values when we raised our kids was to impart spiritual truth. And not just facts. We didn't want them to just have head knowledge, we wanted them to have genuine encounters with Jesus Christ. We wanted them to know him as a person, not just know facts about him. And so that was one of our goals when we were parenting. We were always trying to find ways to engage our kids with people who were really alive with their relationship with Christ. So we introduced them to missionaries and we took them with us on ministry trips so that they could see God at work in the things that God had called us to do. But as they became adults and got married our goal changed from doing that directly with our own six children to wanting to invest the same spiritual values in our grandkids. And so as we’ve had the opportunity over the last twenty years with different ones of our grandkids, we’ve tried to do the same thing. We’ve tried to take them places that would expose them to who God is and who Jesus Christ is so that they might encounter him and want to have a relationship with him too. So we took our kids to Israel and that was the whole goal of taking them to Israel was that they would encounter Jesus in his land and get to know him and to want to know more about who he is.

Dennis: And this trip has been in the works probably for a couple of decades, but earnestly in the last five years. We had to cancel it because of Covid and finally the airports in Israel flew open and we began to talk to our kids. They said, “Hey, if we’re going, we want to bring our kids.”

Barbara: Yeah, they say, “Can we bring our older kids?” And we thought, “Oh, well that wasn’t part of the original idea, but I kinda like that.”

Dennis: Yeah. So we said, any child who is ten years or older can come on this trip. We’re glad that the kids picked up the tab on that.

Barbara: For their own kids.

Dennis: That’s right.

Barbara: Yeah, we paid for ours and they paid for theirs.

Dennis: That's exactly right. And I just want to emphasize what Barbara talked about. We wanted our children to have their own experience with Jesus Christ. Yes, the Bible is a book of truth. But it’s also a book that is living. And by living we mean it changes our lives now, today, and our relationships. We wanted our kids to experience that type of walk with God where it wasn’t a once a week experience, but a day by day, moment by moment, walk with Christ. There is nothing like taking them to the place where God showed up and where Jesus put his feet on the ground. So we went and we decided we would make this real to them by giving them an assignment.

Barbara: We decided that one of the things we wanted to do to help them, not just anticipate it, but also to really engage was asking all of our kids and grandkids to prepare a devotion for the different locations we were going to see. And we didn’t know how that was going to work. We didn’t know if they were going to roll their eyes and go, “Oh great, here they come, Mom and Dad are trying to get us to teach.” You just don’t know with your kids what their response is going to be. And so, I think Dennis and I both were just a little bit…

Dennis: Apprehensive is what we were.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s a good word. We weren’t worried about it, but we were questioning how this was going to go down. I mean, they’re busy people, just like we are, and their kids are busy, and their kids are preoccupied. But I’ll have to say that one of the things that our kids did the best that I think was just an amazing contribution to the success of our trip, is that when they landed on Israeli soil, our son Samuel and our daughter Ashley and their spouses took all the devices away from their kids. So our grandkids had no cell phones, no ipads, no tablets, no electronic games, no nothing. All they had was being present. They had their Bibles, they had a notebook and a pen. I mean, it was very old school. And what it did is set them free from being attached to all these distractions, so they were able to fully engage and I have to tell you that one of the highlights of the trip for me was watching our grandkids do these devotions at the different locations. We paired them up in twos so they didn’t have to feel awkward doing it alone. And we also paired them up in twos with someone who is not a sibling. So they did it as cousins and they did it with someone who they didn’t necessarily see very often or didn’t necessarily know really super well. Because none of the kids live in the same town. And even though the cousins know each other, none of them are just really super good friends, because of proximity. So, it was just so much fun to watch the older cousin with the younger cousin and how they figured it out and what they did and what passages they chose. We gave them the verses and had them pick the one they wanted to do and how they wanted to communicate it. It was just really delightful. What it did for them as well as what it did for us, but really did for them, is that it put them in the moment. It put them in the location. They read the story about Jesus for that particular location, or about David. And they got to experience what might have happened. The one that stands out to me the most is one of the ones that was the creative one. So we had our grandson, Nathan, who is fifteen paired with our granddaughter, Rainey, who is ten. That’s a big age gap. But the two of them put their heads together and we were in the wilderness where David camped out when he was running from Saul. And we were at a location called En Gedi. Historians and archaeologists are confident that En Gedi is the place where David ran and hid from Saul, but it is also the place where he found Saul hiding in a cave. And David went in and cut off the corner of Saul’s robe. And so Nathan and Rainey decided that they would tell the story but they would also act it out. So they had some of the other cousins positioned around this spring where we were all parked and it was just our family so it was really cool. And they had a couple of them standing there and they were Saul’s soldiers. And then another was standing there and he was David’s man. And then they read the story and they acted it out, crawling into the cave and cutting off the corner of Saul’s robe. Then they read what happened afterwards. Our guide even, you remember him, Ronny was his name. At the end of our trip we all shared what was the highlight of the trip for us, and Ronny said his favorite part was watching the kids act out the story of Saul and David at En Gedi. And it just was remarkable for us to watch them read the story. They will never forget that story. They will never forget En Gedi because they were there. They acted it out. They read it. They engaged in it by doing a play acting thing. They’ll never forget that story. So it was a great decision that we weren’t so sure about on the front end if it was going to fly. But all of the kids did it, all of the grandkids did it, and they all did it in creative ways and in ways that were meaningful. They did a really good job teaching the scripture in each of the locations.

Dennis: And I just want to complement our grandkids here. They didn’t complain.

Barbara: They did not complain and I expected it, but they did not.

Dennis: Not one time, not a complaint about no cell phones, no video games, on and on and on, and one of the parents said to me privately, “I’d love to ban them for good.”

Barbara: Yes

Dennis: “We’d love to just do away with them.”

Barbara: Forever

Dennis: That’s right. But I don’t think we realize how much these devices are distracting us from real relationships with real people and with the real God. What the kids began to experience was that Jesus showed up there. And they were actually walking around where he walked by the Sea of Galilee.

One of my favorites was where Elijah took on the prophets of Baal. That devotion was shared by Michael, and basically what he just read 1 Kings 18. We were up on a mountain high above the Mediterranean and we just pictured this story of Elijah confronting the prophets of Baal. This is a long way from water, so picture them hauling all these barrels and barrels and barrels of water up to drench this altar. And after, by the way, the prophets of Baal didn’t raise any fire from their god, because their god doesn’t exist. Michael, our son-in-law, read this story from 1 Kings 18. We had ten grandchildren gathered around. There were three of our adult children and two of them brought their spouses with them. All gathered around this mountain, talking about what that must have been like when God completely roasted that sacrifice and the wood and licked up all the barrels of water with fire. And we stood on the top and thought, this happened right here. God showed up in a powerful, powerful way. And that’s what we are wanting our kids to grasp. He’s not a god of a storybook. In fact, our son Samuel, at the end of the trip, shared something that I want you to share with our listeners because it was profound, I thought.

Barbara: Yeah, it was interesting we had our last dinner together before dark before everybody flew out and then the next morning we went around the circle and just shared what were some of the highlights. And I don’t think anyone limited it to just one because there were so many. But each of us shared three or four, some five, highlights of things that had happened during the week. And Samuel had a really good summary. He said, “You know, it’s like I’ve always known that this was true. I’ve always known God was real. I’ve always believed he walked on earth. I’ve always known it was true. But in a sense, for me, it was as if God coming to earth was like Narnia. It was like it was make-believe. There was this sense that it was just out there, that I couldn’t touch.” But he said, “But being here and being able to walk where Jesus walked, and touch the stones on the southern side of the temple that Jesus literally walked on…” And he said there was something about it that took it from being a Narnia belief to a real belief. And he said, and this was echoed by others, he said, “I want to know more. I want to learn more. I want to understand more because there is this sense in which I understand the realness of it, in a way that I never did.” And we just thought that was a great word picture, a great vision for how so many of us, I think, view the life of Christ. It was so long ago and it was so far away, that we tend to think of it as a fairytale in some ways. And yet to go there, and to see these places, many of them unchanged since he walked the earth, makes it real. And we realize it was real, even if you know it in your head, there is something about the reality of touching it and seeing it that brings it to life.

Dennis: One of our stops was that of a nature preserve that had all kinds of vegetation: trees, flowers, and weeds that were from the time of Christ, and a cistern where they saved water. They showed how a cistern works and how a wine press works to get the grape juice out of the grapes.

Barbara: And do you remember how everybody felt when we pulled up?

Dennis: Oh yeah, we were all thinking, this could really go south in a hurry. But this lady who led our group, where was she from? Was it South Africa or England? She had a British accent. And she had the kids, and us, mesmerized by how often the Bible mentions all the vegetation that God created, and how he designed Israel to be lush and beautiful, which it is today. And I went to Israel back in 1971 four years after the six days war, and I promise you, it was not lush then. The place had been ravaged. It had been a war zone. But now it’s for the most part really peaceful and there really is no threat or a danger to being there. I know a whole lot of people wonder about that, taking your kids and your grandkids on something like this. We really never felt threatened the entire time.

Barbara: No, it really is one of the safest places on the planet, to be honest, because they are so diligent about security. So, it was great.

Dennis: One of the highlights for me was going down to the Jordan River and participating in a baptism of six of our grandchildren. Our son, Samuel asked me to assist him in baptizing his three that came. Then I baptized three of the Mutz girls - twins who were twelve, and Rainey, interestingly named after us - our last name, who was ten. And I got a chance to baptize them and declare Christ as Lord, Master, and Savior of each of those kids. After I was done and we were celebrating down there a jewish man walked up to me, and said, “Would you baptize us?” A total stranger.

Barbara: Well we were totally caught off guard because these three men walked up and they were sort of encroaching on our space because we were all crying and hugging. It was just such a great moment for our family but these three men just kind of hovered over our shoulders. It was really interesting. It was odd and we just thought, okay, you know, we’ll get out of your way and you can have your turn, because there were a couple of locations on the river and people were taking turns, and they would come down and everybody had robes on, and it was very obvious who was there to be baptized and who wasn’t. These three men had on robes and they were, we thought, waiting their turn. But they weren’t waiting their turn and they wanted you to baptize them.

Dennis: They didn’t know me from a load of coal and I didn’t know them. It was really a hoot.

Barbara: It was so funny, because all of us watching were thinking, well okay then, I guess that’s what’s next.

Dennis: Well, I stood there in the water and I’m thinking, what would Jesus do? Well he’d baptize them, for goodness sake. Jewish believers. He’s their Messiah, and so one after another, I baptized these three guys. One of them was a pretty good size guy and he didn’t know how to go down into the water and so he nearly drowned me in the process. It was really a lot of fun. And the last one, his name was Wallace, and Wallace said, “I go to a baptist church here in Israel and Jesus is my Messiah and I want to be baptized.” I asked him if he believed Jesus was the Son of God and if he had placed his faith in him as his Savior, Master, and Lord. So I baptized my brother in Christ. And this was kind of touching to me, but after we were finished and I was walking up the steps away from them, I put my hand over my heart, and I said, “I’ll see you in heaven.” Total strangers. And the kids, of course, witnessed this, and I don’t know what it meant to them, didn’t really hear. But it was a trip filled with adventure at every stop. We stopped at places on the Mediterranean, we went, as I mentioned, to where Elijah took on the prophets of Baal, we went to the Sea of Galilee all the way down to Jerusalem and multiple sites there. And really, it was the adventure of a lifetime. Because you’re going places you’ve read about. In our case, for decades. And all of a sudden it’s alive because you are really standing in the places where Jesus stood. We were on the Sea of Galilee and it was perfectly calm. The last time you and I were there back in 2011, we had a storm come up and our boat wrecked another boat and we nearly had people injured because the waves were so big and stormy. We had two experiences on the Sea of Galilee the two times we’ve been on the sea. I think the kids really enjoyed the quiet. And just looking at the area and thinking of Jesus showing up in the dark in the midst of the storm and rescuing the disciples. Well, sweetheart, I’ve kind of dominated some of my favorite moments and I’ve got one more I want to share. But what about you? Do you have another that you’d like to share?

Barbara: Well, there are just so many. I loved watching everything come alive for our kids and our grandkids. I loved watching them engage and take notes and ask questions and I just watched their eyes light up and that was really the biggest highlight for me. But personally, one of my favorite things that we did this time that we also did when we were there in 2011, is we went on a tour of the underground tunnels and area underneath the western wall. So the western wall is one of the pieces that’s remaining from antiquity. It’s not from the time of Christ, but some of the rocks way down underground may be. I don’t know for sure and I don’t know that they told us. Nonetheless, there was something about going underneath the western wall. There are all these huge foundation stones underneath the ground level. They’ve dug these tunnels and you can go down there and see them and see all kinds of things. There’s even a chapel built underground. It’s amazing how much is underground. And so I think that part of what was so impressive to me this time and last time is that this is such a picture of what God is like. We know what we see in the Bible and even then we hardly even scratch the surface of what is in the Bible. But we have the Bible. It is above ground. We can read it. We can know what he has revealed to us in the Bible. But there’s so much more about God that we don’t know that is hidden, that is below ground like these foundation stones. There was a foundation stone that our guide pointed out to us that we took pictures of and he said, “I want you to look at that.” We couldn’t get close to it and touch it, but it was across a little hallway that was exposed and they had lights on it. He said that the foundation stone is the biggest one underneath the temple wall and that it is forty-two feet long, ten and a half feet high, and seven feet deep. And it’s solid. And he said that nobody knows how they cut that, where they cut, how they moved it into place, and that the stone would weigh the equivalent of sixty to eighty african elephants. And so there’s something about seeing that stone that’s just made me appreciate the depth of God. The unknown side of God. The massive side of God that we can’t touch, we can’t see. It’s not available to us in the scripture, but we know it’s there because God is a mystery. God dwells in unapproachable light. Much of him is hidden from view. And that’s the way those foundation stones under the temple are. And, of course, it also reminded me of all the scriptures about laying a foundation and that we are living stones and that Christ is the foundation stone. So, there were just a lot of things about that one little tour that we did that made it one of my favorite parts of our trip. Seeing all of that and understanding the implications, not just about my faith, but about the God that I know and that I’m trying to get to know, was really remarkable.

Dennis: And for me, well, while we were doing that I was watching the guy who gave us the tour underneath the wall and I wanted to ask him a question publicly to get his response.

Barbara: And he is a brilliant, Jewish archaeologist and he said he’d been an archaeologist for all his career. He was probably in his fifties. I want to say that he said his dad was a rabbi, isn’t that right?

Dennis: Yeah, I think so.

Barbara: And so he was very learned, very studied and he really knew his stuff. But he was very personable and very relatable. He had stories that he told. This was another one of our tours where the guide made all the difference because he told the kids stories as we went. It wasn’t just facts. It wasn’t just numbers. But he was telling stories along the way. He was really a great combination of intelligence and stories with all kinds of interesting things that he told us.

Dennis: I just liked him.

Barbara: Yeah, I liked him too.

Dennis: I went up to him privately, and I told him, I said, “You know,” and I’ll call him Dan, “Dan, I was going to ask you this question publicly but I didn’t want to put you on the spot with my kids and grandkids or in any way embarrass you, but I’m just wondering, who do you think Jesus really is?” And he took my question to heart and he said, “Well, interesting you should ask me that.”

Barbara: But while you were doing that, do you remember what I was doing?

Dennis: No

Barbara: Everyone else had kind of scattered because it was the end of the tour. We were back above ground and Ashley, our oldest, and I were standing there. As soon as I heard you ask that question, she and I started praying, because we were watching. I thought, I know where he’s going with this and I just want to pray for this man that he will have ears to hear. So Ashley and I both stood there and prayed while you were talking to him.

Dennis: Yeah, and I don’t believe he was placating me. I really don’t. In fact, you’re going to be surprised at his answer. He said, “Well, it’s interesting you should ask me that, because I’ve been asked by the Israeli government to work on a time machine where you can go back in time and visit the past.” And he said, “If this thing works, I may give you a call.” He was saying, “I’m going to go back to the time of Jesus and just listen and look and watch.” And I told him I appreciated his integrity and his answer and I got a feeling that if that time machine gets built, I don’t know if it will get built, but the Israelis, they’re brilliant.

Barbara: The things they create and invent are amazing. So who knows? I wouldn’t put it past them.

Dennis: If he goes back and encounters Christ, maybe he will find out who he is today: the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Savior of the world, the Messiah.

Barbara: And maybe that will be the way that others come to know Jesus is the Messiah too, you never know.

Dennis: Maybe. No doubt about it.

Barbara: Because there will be many that will come to know him.

Dennis: Well it was a lifetime trip for us, wasn't it, sweetheart?

Barbara: It was. Except we may repeat it because the kids in the last couple days, as we were sharing that night, and even since, they were talking about when can we go back? When can we go back? We’ve got to go back. We’ve got to take the other kids that didn’t get to go. The younger ones that were not old enough. They all want to go back and take the younger ones and they want their siblings to go. So it may not be just a trip of a lifetime. We may repeat it.

Dennis: Yep. We’ll see. The flight back was thirteen hours from Tel Aviv to JFK. That was a brutal trip.

Barbara: Well you have to plan this, going to Israel, you have to plan it two years in advance, minimum. Just getting rooms, you know, and all the details worked out with tour guides and all that. The minimum you start working on it is two years ahead. So, you don’t decide two months ahead to go to Israel. It takes a lot of work.

Dennis: Well, we’re good friends with the owners of the tour agency that took us, Morning Star. Mike and Sherry are good friends and if you are interested in checking it out you can go to their website.

Barbara: They run tours all the time and I’ll bet they’ve got spaces on some of them.

Dennis: I’ll bet they do. But, you might want, if you’ve got a big enough family, you might want to just host your own. That’s what we’ve really liked.

Barbara: It was great.

Dennis: Barbara, you know it occurs to me that our listeners may just need a little nudge to make this an intentional part of their faith. To talk with their kids about their experience with Jesus Christ, their experience with the truth of God’s word, how they are growing today, how they’re seeing him at work in their lives…

Barbara: And you are not just meaning taking them to Israel. You are talking about everyday life. Right?

Dennis: Right. I think that is one of the reasons we have so many kids leaving the church today.

Barbara: I agree.

Dennis: They look at their parents and they see them taking them to church once a week, but God doesn’t show up the other six and a half days of the week. And I think we as parents have a mandate in scripture, in fact Psalm 78, if you have a chance to read it, Psalm 78, verses 5 - 8, talks about how God has established a testimony and has appointed a law. What is a testimony? It is our experience of God. And what is the law? It is the truth. And in the passage it says he has appointed these things that we should teach them to our children lest our children become like our fathers who forgot God, disobeyed God, and rebelled. And so we’re really involved in a relay race. I just want to encourage you, tonight at the dinner table just share how God showed up in your life today. Maybe this podcast is a part of it.

Barbara: Yeah, or how did he show up this week. It doesn’t have to be something specific today but something that your kids may not know about, a way that God gave you wisdom in your job, or he provided something for you that you asked for, or he gave you the right words to say with a friend, or coworker. I mean, I think there are so many things that God is doing that we are not aware of or are not paying attention to. And I think when we say to our kids, or even to spouses, or friends, or to one another about what God is doing in our lives, it grows our faith. It grows one another’s faith and it helps our kids say, “Oh, this is real in mom or dad’s life. This isn’t just something that we have to do as a family, go to church on Sunday morning. This is real to them.” And I think our kids need to see us engaging in our faith and talking about it and sharing with them what happened and what God did. They aren’t going to get it otherwise if it is just going to church on Sunday, if it’s just a list of to-do’s, if it’s just a checklist. Who wants that? We’ve got enough checklists. What we want is a real relationship with a real God and we have to communicate that to our kids for them to want it too.

Dennis: And if you are wondering where to start, maybe open the gospel of John. Because that book was written that you might believe in the Son of God. Some great stories in there. Just read a paragraph about something Jesus did. I love the way the book concludes. It says in the very last verse of the book of John. It says, “Many more things did Jesus do in his life,” In fact, he said it like the writer, the apostle John, just kind of mused out loud and said, “In fact, if they’d been written down, all the books in the world could not contain them.” Jesus showed up on planet earth.

Barbara: He did a lot.

Dennis: He did a lot, and he’s still doing it!

Barbara: He’s still doing a lot.

Dennis: Well I just want to say thanks to our listeners for listening and for reading. Our blogs are setting new records every week. It’s just astounding. Almost a quarter million people have read some of the most recent blogs and we’re just thrilled to be able to minister to you. My wife, Barbara, has a gift in writing. She’s not done yet, and neither am I. Stay tuned.

Samantha: Well, not only are Dennis and Barbara not done ministering to us in writing, but they also have more to share about their trip to the Holy Land. So stay tuned for that, too.

I think the main takeaway for us all is to work hard at bringing the Bible to life. Even if you can’t hop on a plane and go to Israel, you can probably hop on the Internet and look at photos or videos of these places. Just a thought. OR you can subscribe to Barbara’s Friends and Family and check out photos and stories of the Raineys’ trip to Israel. It’s only $5 a month, and you’ll have access to all the new content Barbara’s added since January, including lots of highlights from their trip. To sign up, just go to BarbaraRainey.substack.com .

Hey, one really cool way to bring the Bible to life is by reading and meditating on the poem Barbara wrote, titled A Love Letter to the Lost in This Land: The Story of Scripture. In it, she uses poetry to examine the major themes of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. We’ve printed a limited number of copies, and you can order yours for a donation of $10 or more. All the information is at EverThineHome.com/LoveLetter.

I’m Samantha Keller. Thanks for listening today! Dennis and Barbara have more to share about their trip to Israel, so be sure to catch Part Two of their reflections on the next edition of the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.