A Note from Katy...

If there is one thing you need to know about before planning your next trip to the Holy Land, it's: STAIRS. Stairs are everywhere! (I suppose when building cities atop mountains, this is the result.)

Stairs and I have not always been as close as we are now. And to be honest, we're not all that close now. About three weeks before I was scheduled to leave for Tel Aviv, I began a diet and workout plan to help myself get ready primarily for the travel and also for the walking. Little did I know that those three weeks would be the most important thing about my entire Holy Land tour.

Perhaps you are one of those people who runs every day or does yoga before your morning coffee or only uses egg whites. Well, I'll try to love you anyway. My body and I have never been great friends. I had, in fact, almost given up hope that we might ever be reconciled to one another, much less in a place filled with physical hurdles. But those weeks of preparation, and more importantly the results of those three weeks, have taken my relationship with my body to new heights. Literally.

Every step I take here in the Holy Land has been a reminder of the resiliency of the human body and the Holy Spirit. Each set of stairs and every inclined cobbled street and even the ancient roads of the Roman ruins are a physical reminder of where I have come from and where I am going. When I finish one of these "accomplishments" (for example, reaching the top of a long line of stair-steps) my heart is filled with joy and pride and wonder.

I have always been more confident in my spiritual self than in my physical self. But somehow in the work of conditioning my outer body, God has been at work conditioning my inner spirit. As a favorite poet of mine says: "He's found beauty in what doesn't seem beautiful."

More than any others, there has been one set of stairs that has meant the most to me. A small set of stairs, leading up out of a pit in the lower section of Caiaphus' house. Some 2000 years ago or a little less, Jesus was thrown into this pit before his final execution. It is a pit of darkness, a pit of despair, a pit of humiliation and pain. And yet it is the pit of God himself.

Out of my own pit, I have cried unto the Lord and here in the countless steps of the Holy Land, he has inclined and heard my cry.

Step by step, I am revealing an inner strength, discovering possibilities long buried under self-recrimination. It's time to come up out of the pit.