Shepherd's Field and Back to Bethlehem

Hey Everyone-! I hear we left just before a big snowstorm hit and that the Chicago Airport was shut down the day after we left! Ben and I have made it here safely. Still kicking our jet-lag at this point as there is a 7 hour time difference (8 hours from Ironwood or Menominee or Chicago!) So if it’s 5 pm your time then it’s midnight for me! (Thus why I get really hungry or tired at weird times).
Bethlehem is quite a place. It’s [mostly] surrounded by a 24 foot concrete wall due to the complicated political situation here. Five times a day the mysterious warble and drone of the Muslim call to prayer reverberates throughout the city- I think we’re used to all of them except the first (which is sometime before 5 a.m., though I haven’t yet had the heart to actually look at my alarm clock)- In Arabic, I’m told, they proclaim: “Arise! Come to salvation at Dawn- prayer is better than sleep!”

Yesterday Ben and I walked to ‘Shepherd’s Field’- the place where the angels appeared to the shepherds the night that Jesus was born. (See Luke 2:8-20) There was a little round church there and some low-ceiling caves made into chapels. In the time of Christ shepherds would have kept their animals in caves and slept sitting up in the doorways (with their backs to one doorpost and their feet to the other)- this way they could keep their sheep or cattle in and wild animals and thieves out. I imagine that the shepherds would have been doing just that when they looked up and heard the angels singing. King David was also a shepherd in Bethlehem- who knows? Maybe he tended sheep there too.
Not having a star to guide us, we got a bit lost on the way back into Bethlehem (it was daytime anyway- and sporadically rainy). It takes about a half an hour to walk back to the Church of the Nativity where Christ was born- though I bet it takes less time if you know your way. Or if you’re an excited Shepherd who has just seen a multitude of angels telling you the Savior has just been born (Luke tells us that “they came in haste”!)

My first day here I had walked to the Church of the Nativity- sitting in Manger Square two Palestinian kids sat next to me tried to teach me some Arabic words (one of them knew some English and wanted to learn more). The main languages spoken here in Israel are Arabic, then Hebrew, and then English.
I’ll tell you more about the Church of the Nativity after we get our official tour-! Hope all is going well back home.

-Mike