THE Hike of my life...

Hiking Mount Sinai was the most difficult thing I have probably ever done. Not only am I a total wuss but it was 2 am, dark and freeeeezing. The night before, at the hotel I was already cold so my roommate Emma and I went to the shop to load up on gloves and hats. Good thing Jerusalem Center faculty told us not to bring a big coat... Anyway, it was the best 7 dollars I ever spent. As I said, we woke up at 2, and drove to the bottom of the mountain to begin our journey. We all had flashlights because it was pitch black. I think the dark added a lot to the difficulty of the hike as well, I kept stumbling over rocks that I didn't see. Of course you can't get away from tourist shops even on a dang mountain so there were men with camels walking up and down trying to get us to ride one and a few shops along the way even. Let me just tell you, there was not enough room on that path for me and a camel! One man told me to watch out for his camel and I said your camel needs to watch out for me! (Don't mess with me that early in the morning when I'm sweaty...) It was beautiful though. There were more stars than I had ever seen in my life. Every once and a while my group would stop and just take in the beauty of God's creation. After 2 and a half hours of this torture we finally reached the top just before sunrise. It was the coldest I had ever been in my life. It was at least -4 degrees C, we were later told, and we were all sweaty which made the wind even more chilling. Our group got so much closer as we waited for sunrise, literally. We were all just one big group holding each other. The sunrise was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. It was beautiful and totally worth the dang hard hike. As we started hiking back down, I guess my friends and I got distracted talking and realized the teacher that was behind us was no longer there. Come to find out we had taken a wrong turn and he didn't tell us, so he went the right way! We ended up having to basically scale down the mountain on a really steep incline, and it was pretty scary. It was quite the adventure though, it made the sacrifice even better.

Today in my Old Testament class, we talked about what our hike represented. The children of Israel wouldn't go up Mt. Sinai to see the Lord. Us hiking up that mountain showed symbolically how we are ready for Him. There was so much symbolizm in the darkness that we climbed up in compared to the light waiting for us at the end of the hard work. Some people (not people in the program) have fallen off cliffs while trying to make the hike early in the morning, so I felt like it was a real live iron rod experience for me. Needless to say, this was one of my favorite parts of my entire trip so far, even for a non-hiker like me!