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If you were looking for oddities, you came to the right place. I'm an unschooling mom and writer living on the Canadian prairies.
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wild (but not uncultivated) musings of a Canadian unschool momHome | Archives | contact I Saw Israel10:46 PM - Feb. 22, 2008 - Add to the Wildness
Have you ever seen something that just made it hit home that God is real and at work in the world? This winter, I did. I spent the Christmas holidays in Montreal with my brother and his family (a very expensive present from my hubby). One evening that week, driving back from the day's activities, my sister-in-law took the scenic route home. She's great for showing the beautiful side of the city, and that night was one of the most amazing I've experienced in my travels anywhere. She took us to a Jewish neighbourhood. "You can tell the Orthodox homes," she said, "because they have a little tablet thingy on the doorpost. I don't know what they call it--look, there's one, did you see it?" I knew what she was talking about. My eyes stung with awe as I picked out the small object. Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. A rush of emotions overtook me. Memories of reading those Scriptures, of hearing and reading about Jewish life, something that in my world was either long ago or far away, or both. As we drove along the street, studying the close-crowded brick homes with their warmly glowing windows, I was overwhelmed with a sudden, undeniable wave of reality. Life is pretty monochrome out here in a prairie small town. Most people are French, English or Ukranian in background. Most have lived here for generations, since the homesteading days. Most are drenched in a strange, plaid-jacket-and-cap-clothed mix of pop culture and rural localisms. Except for the First Nations, most trace their ancestry to somewhere else. We're not really a nation, here in Canada. You won't find our New World ancestral grounds in Genesis 10. We're an odd amalgam of nations--which the Bible defines as linguistically distinct people groups genetically descended from the original families which spread out from ancient Mesopotamia. My infant homeland, like the United States of America, is an artificial political entity, nothing more. There, on a snow-lined Montreal street, I felt the heartbeat of a much older land, half a world away, at the centre of all the earth's doings. The tablets on the lintels bore silent testimony that the God of the Bible is real, that the Scripture's history did happen and is still happening today. I saw Israel. Under beards and wide-brimmed black hats, I saw the DNA of a man named Jacob, and he became real to me. I thought of all the promises God made to him, and while I knew before that they will be fulfilled, suddenly, I really knew. Just as Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek while he was still in Abraham's loins, these people in twenty-first century Montreal received the promises of God while they were still in Jacob's loins. There is a land that's theirs by divine decree, a decree never experienced by any other nation. What caught my heart most on that street was the sense of waiting. A wondrous sense of promises whose depth is unknown to the people themselves. They are a nation holy to God, and their purpose did not end with the death of Messiah. There is a purpose in their existence, even in a foreign land, halfway to the other end of the earth. Here, thousands of miles and years away, these people spoke to the heart of a passing Gentile. Silently, they said, God is true. They are Israel. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your sons may be multiplied on the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens remain above the earth. © Copyright Cathi-Lyn Dyck 2005-2008
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