Week 4 Highlights: Happy Hannukah and Dead Sea Field Trip

 

Hello, friends and family!  I hope this has been a good week for you!  Today (when I started writing this-Dec 14) is the official start of Hannukah, and the donuts have come out in all their beauty like a flower that blooms just one week of the year.  Our favorites are those with chocolate filling.  Hannukah is a good time to think about how to increase the degree of light in our lives.  This is always a timely invitation, but especially as the sun sets earlier and there always seems to be bad news near at hand.

Last week we went with the students to the southeast to see where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.  

Some well-preserved ruins show structures built by the Essenes to support their strictly observant life of communal meals, ritual purification, study, and copying of scrolls.  

You can see Cave 4 as a small dark spot just left of center in the photo above.  

Both Dr. Hopkin 2nd from left) and Dr. Strathearn (far right) have written articles about portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  These significant documents gave the world documentation of the text of the Old Testament which was hundreds of years older than what had been available before before their discovery. 

Our next stop was Ein Gedi, which means "spring of the wild goats."  Usually the students rush up the trail like wild goats, but currently only the first waterfall is open, due to heavy rains in May which washed out many of the paths and railings.  So they settled for splashing in the waterfall and pool.  Ein Gedi connects to the Bible as the location where David's men were hiding from Saul who had sought to kill him.  While there, Saul visited the location, not knowing David was hiding nearby.  David could have killed Saul while he was vulnerable, but David refused to harm Saul because he was still the Lord's anointed king.  The students had a devotional at this spot about the power of forgiveness.

Next we drove further south along the Dead Sea to Masada.  This is an amazing place, bigger than you'd expect, a hilltop fortress and palace complex fortified by Herod and used in a rebellion against Rome.  

Herod installed all the luxuries of Roman living, such as this bathhouse.  Under the heated floor were these pillars to allow for steam to circulate.  This bathhouse had a hot room, a warm room, and a cold room.  Visitors left feeling refreshed and exfoliated. 

The rugged landscape looked pretty uninviting!  

The weather was temperate for us, only about 75 degrees in December, but in the summer it can easily reach 100 or higher.  Herod's engineers had to bring water to the side of Masada through aqueducts, then donkeys carried water to the top where it was stored in a network of cisterns. 

Here's a view of the stairway of the great cistern, the biggest on Masada, and maybe the biggest in the middle east!  

 It could hold a million gallons of water, according to one source.   

Someone had made a ring of stones about 10 feet in diameter.  This would be a good place to sit and sing.

Here is a picture of me standing in that ring of stones as seen from the opposite wall of the cistern.  I am absolutely dwarfed by this place. This was likely a quarry before it was completed and waterproofed.  

Frank showed his students this picture of the King of Pop visiting Masada.  

The location where he was sitting is not longer accessible but you can still lean over a railing and take a picture of the spot.  Some students used technology to recreat this photo.  

Last stop for this field trip:  Dead Sea!

It was fun to see how students squealed with delight as each sat back in the water and felt the force of the water lift them up.  They knew it would happen, but still they were surprised when they actually felt it themselves!

As the students prepared for their finals, I made lots of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.  Thankfully they turned out well!  

Emily has been working hard on an art portfolio application, and her pieces are beautifully and visually interesting and varied.  

The young men and young women went gokarting for the last activity of the year.  It was a lot of fun, wrenching our stiff steering wheels this way and that, stomping hard on reluctant pedals to produce gasoline fumes. and feeling the clunky helmets slipping around our heads.  

I’ve taken longer to share this that usual, so I’ll wrap this up, with just an observation about the gokarts.  The objective was to have the shortest possible average lap time, so at first there was a lot of passing during the time I was just trying to get used to the course.  Some people were getting all fancy, and so I tried to pass somebody.  That just made me smack into the back of them, which we were told was no good, that we’d get pulled out of the race if we were crashing on purpose.  

So I decided my new goal was to go smoothly and avoid collisions at all costs.  That sometimes meant patience if a young person in front of me was going slowly.  Sometimes that meant stomping on the brake when others would crash in front of me.  A few times the collision spun someone around so they faced into the tire border.   The karts have no reverse, so they’d have to wait for a worker to come haul them back to the right way.  This reminded me of how we try to stay on the path, but when we get turned around we often need help getting back on track. It gave me a lot of peace to know that someone was ready and willing to help me if I got stuck! 

This reminds me of President Nelson inviting us to discover the joy of daily repentance.   In April 2022 he said, “Please do not fear or delay repenting⁠. Satan delights in your misery. Cut it short. Cast his influence out of your life! Start today to experience the joyof putting off the natural man. The Savior loves us always but especiallywhen we repent⁠. He promised that though “the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed … my kindness shall not depart from thee.”

I am grateful to feel God’s kindness to me in little and big ways, especially when I have the opportunity to repent! So last week I was trying to be funny and said something sarcastic to a student.  It was a student who likes to joke around, but I could tell he was surprised that I would be sarcastic in a way that put him down.  I felt bad about it and apologized at the next opportunity, and he was gracious and all was back on track.  I am glad we get second chances, and so thankful God trusts us to figure out how to use this gift of agency!  

I hope you feel light and joy as Christmas and Hannukah and other celebrations light up the dark winter time.  Remember the greatest of all gifts: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whoso believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life!”