Posts in 2025
the israeli backpacker phenomenon

In the 1970’s came the drifter-tourists. Having completed very tense Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conscriptions in very tense times, these individual nonconformists began reacting to the predictable status quo of Jewish life in a land surrounded by enemies who wanted to push them into the sea. They took a break and went trekking! Most of these early drifter-tourists came from the socio-economic center of Israeli life and were forced to travel on a shoestring budget. They went to places where it was cheap to subsist and where Jewish people could normally travel uninhibited and without fear of antisemitic retaliation. These pioneers unwittingly blazed trails in South Asia and South America, established popular itineraries, and forged bucket lists that would become popular, a predictable status quo in and of itself, for the Israeli trekkers who would come later.

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go through the land and describe it

Much has already happened in 2025, our 23rd straight year of Great Commission ministry and consistent Gospel testimony. The same message we preached in 2003 as I rode a bicycle across America is the same message we preached in 2023 on a long walk across America. It’s the same message we have preached in forty-six foreign countries and it will be the same message next month in #47 …

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the breadth of it

Last Friday, I walked the first “breadth” or SPUR off #TheLongWalkUSA main route, carrying the cross and a U.S. flag in distress.  While several from our local church joined up with other brethren to lift up voices outside the Planned Parenthood in Asheville, North Carolina, we walked from that death mill to the junction with the Blue Ridge Parkway off US 25, a 6-mile spur.

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