Transition Period

Well, I find myself at a similar place to my favorite college team. I am in a time of turmoil and transition. A time of trying to figure out what is going on. We left the country of Israel on Saturday. This is the biggest transition of the Holy Lands program. For the first three weeks, I have been inundated with information. I have had solid tests to gauge the degree to which I was absorbing the vast amounts of people, places, and events. All three given by a brilliant professor who made everything extremely interesting. Here in Istanbul, we have seen some of the most amazing sights in the world (Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, Ephesus' Amphitheater, ect.) and yet all I feel like I haven't learned one thing. Most of this is probably because our tour guide, Oz, as knowledgeable as he might be, is straight up boring. He seems to rush us through sights and not allow us to absorb the surroundings or understand how the sight flows. We push fast all day... but still I am left wondering what we saw. I could write pages on every sight we saw during our 3 weeks in Israel. I don't know if I could write a substantive page on our 2 days here in Turkey. Tour guides make all the difference apparently. Life will go on though. On the bright side, my only assignment for the next 3 weeks is a paper on what the church today could take from the church of Ancient Turkey, Greece, and Rome. I will probably end up talking about the value of Tradition, which is often overlooked or misrepresented in protestant circles. I will also talk about the need to constantly be learning from those who witnessed the work of Christ... i.e. the Apostles and those who wrote the New Testament. I hope that I get more information to talk about over the next few weeks. Otherwise, this second half of the trip would merely be a vacation.... which as nice as that would be, is not my goal for this excursion. I hope i gain some greater insight on the New Testament, particularly the Epistles in this second half of the trip, much like I did for the Old Testament and Gospels on the first half.