Interest

I once heard a bank manager say that when he got married in the 1950s, he could buy a new house with three times his annual salary. Now it takes six times the average salary to buy a new house. The difference is that women have gone into the workforce. In the 1950s, most families were single income, whereas now they have two. Two incomes allow a family to service twice as much debt, so the size of mortgages have doubled. This pushed up the price of houses.

Families still live in very similar houses, but they now have bigger mortgages, so they pay for the house in interest four times over instead of just two. No one is better off, except the banks who collect the interest. And the people who bought their houses in the 1950s and 1960s and sold them to two income familes.

Working gives women a lot more freedom, but much of the extra family income goes to the banks.

Threat to Israel

The leaders of Israel are blind. They see Iran as their greatest threat. A quick look at the map proves this is not true. There is a 1000 miles of desert between the two countries.

The real threat to Israel is Saudi Arabia. Its border is less than a 100 miles from Jerusalem. The United States has supplied the Saudis with a huge amount of military equipment. Ostensibly, because they are on our side (just like the Shah of Iran was on our side). Very clever.

The corrupt monarchy that controls Saudi Arabia will eventually collapse. No one knows who will gain control when that happens. It could be the Shia. On the other hand, there are a million Yemenis in Saudi Arabia, mostly migrant workers.

One thing is certain. Given the support and training that Israel has given to the state control apparatus in Saudi Arabia, they will not be friends of Israel.

War of Terror

The greater terror in the world today is not experienced in America, but in the villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan, who live much of their day under the shadow of Predator Drones, lazily circling in the sky. These people never know when the controllers in Arizona will stop sipping coke and press a button to launch the missile to destroy their village and their lives, because someone with a grudge has dobbed them into American intelligence.

The War on Terror has become a War of Terror.

Law Released

Isaiah 2:2-4 is a great prophecy of peace. It is repeated again in Micah 4:1-5. The prophecy ends with a marvellous vision for the future.

They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore (Is 2:4).

The prophecy explains the reason for this great transformation.

The law will go out from Zion
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem (Is 2:3).

Most Christians assume this will be fulfilled when Jesus returns to rule the world from a throne in Jerusalem. But this is not want the prophecy declares. The reason for the peace between the nations is that God’s law gets out of Jerusalem.

God gave his perfect law to Moses more than 3000 years ago. Since then it has generally been ignored by the nations. Most Christians hate God’s law and assume that it is only for Israel. God’s law has been locked up in Jerusalem.

The law is the word of the Lord for nations and government. Peace between the nations will emerge, when God’s law gets out of Jerusalem and is accepted by the peoples of the nations as the only true basis for good government.

Theology of Government

Christians try to build a theology of Government on the basis of Romans 13. This just does not work. Paul was not articulating a theology of government. He was providing advice about coping with life under a despotic ruler, not articulating an ideal.

God had already given a theology of government in the Torah. Christians who are serious about developing theology of government should begin there.

Kinect causes Quake in Christchurch

Boxing day began in Christchurch with several strong aftershocks to the earthquake. The last one was 4.9 on the Richter scale, which is strong enough to knock things off shelves.

Yesterday thousands of families in Christchurch got Kinect consoles as a Christmas gift. This morning, they plugged Kinect into their Xboxes and started to play. I presume that the mass of infrared rays and sound waves sent out by so many sensors at the same time penetrated the earth and released the earthquake.

Or perhaps it was just the additional weight from all the poorly-chewed turkey.

Huge Burden for One Day

Christmas Day carries a huge burden. We try to pack so much into it, much more than one day can bear.

Christmas is a highlight of the spiritual and religious year, requiring a more spectacular religious celebration than last year.

Christmas is a day when families get together, but in a globalised world, this is almost impossible. The snow did not help in the northern hemisphere.

Christmas lunch must be the best meal of the year. In days when food was scarce, that was the reality, but in an age of plenty people dine at restaurants all the time, it is an impossible goal.

Christmas is a day for the best possible gifts. When I was a child, we played with our Christmas gifts for the rest of the year. Now children get so many expensive gifts, that diminishing returns set in. No matter how wonderful the seventh present, it brings very little pleasure. The same seven gifts would bring far more enjoyment, if they were spread throughout the year.

With such high expectations on one day, no wonder it is often a let-down.

Political Event

On Christmas morning, while waiting for the family to turn up for lunch, I turned on the television and watched some of the Nine Lessons and Carols at St Pauls Anglican cathedral in Wellington. The carols were too high class and the clergy and choir dressed like pirates were a bit of a worry, but the scripture lessons were interesting. The three that I watched were:

Isaiah 9:6-7
Isaiah 11:1-9
Luke 1:26-38

Listening to these texts, I was struck by how much we ignore the clear message of the scriptures.

The church has turned the turned the incarnation into a religions event, or at best, a spiritual event. However there texts have very little spiritual stuff in them. Their clear message is that the incarnation was a political event. Herod seems to be the only person that understood the message.

Permanent Downward Shift

The New Zealand Treasury recently issues the following picture.

Their spokesperson said that the impact of the global financial crisis on the NZ economy was not purely cyclical. After most downturns, the economy usually recovers quickly and returns to the growth path that it was on before the crisis. Their analysis suggests that this will not happen with this crisis, so the lost output will not be restored.

The Treasury is worried that the government will not receive the same level of tax revenue as before. I am more worried about the loss of output. I dug into the numbers to identify the sector where the output has been permanently lost. What I found is interesting. The services sector is doing fine. Agriculture has struggled, but is still doing okay. The construction industry declined rapidly at the end of the housing boom, but will eventually recover when growth population increases the demand for housing. The retail sector has been flat. Nothing striking in any of these!

The big change has taken place in the manufacturing sector. The middle column of the table below, shows the change in sales adjusted for price change in the manufacturing sector between 2007 and 2010. The right-hand column expresses this change as a percentage. The column on the left shows the original size of the industry.

Source: Statistics NZ

The only industry to grow is paper and paper products (so much for the paperless office). Most other industries have lost at least a hundred million dollars of sales. The larger industries have lost more than two hundred million dollars of sale. Looking at the entire manufacturing sector sales of nearly two billion dollars have disappeared from a sector worth eleven billion. This is the equivalent of our entire forestry-related industries disappearing overnight (Wood and Paper Products). Fill jobs in Manufacturing declined by 17 percent over the same period.

Some of the activity may return when the construction sector recovers, but I presume that most of this activity is gone forever, possibly to China.

This is the Permanent Downward Shift in Output. Putting it more bluntly, the manufacturing sector has been gutted in the last few years.

One reason is lack of demand from trading partners. The other reason is the Reserve Bank's policy of keeping interest rates high to kill the housing boom. The high interest rates caused problems for real businesses. They also attracted speculators, which strengthened the New Zealand exchange rate, which put pressure on exporters. This was a double whammy for manufacturers.

Big Dipper

The government statistical agency has just released economic growth statistics for the September 2010 quarter. The Christmas news is that GDP has declined by 0.2 percent.

The New Zealand economy peaked in the Dec 2007 quarter. The recession began in Mar 2008 quarter, a quarter earlier than in most other countries, because a serious drought affected our agriculture industries. The economy bottomed out in the March 2009 quarter after five quarters of recession, with GDP 3.5 percent below the peak. The banks in New Zealand had not got caught up with the subprime junk that contaminated the Northern Hemisphere, so the decline was not as big as in many other countries. The recession in the United States was almost twice as deep.

Since the bottom of the recession, the economy has been recovering slowly, but now it has stumbled, with only half of what was lost being recovered. Our GDP is still 1.7 percent below what it was at the peak. The construction industry has not recovered and the retail sector is still struggling. The good news is that the NZ dollar has weakened over the last few months as speculators have withdrawn, and prices for dairy and meat products, which are a huge chunk of our exports, are at record highs. Unemployment is below 7 percent, so there is no reason why the 0.2 percent decline is a signal that things will get dramatically worse.

Some commentators are talking about a double dip depression. That is a bit misleading, because there is no indication that we are going into a massive decline. A better description would be a big dip.

Discerning Videos

Several times in the past year, a Christian has directed me to a video of a church meeting that they were concerned about and suggested that I discern what spirits were present.

The problem with these requests is that they fail to understand the way the gift of discernment works. The Holy Spirit lives within me. If I encounter a person or enter a place controlled by an evil spirit, the Holy Spirit get agitated with in me to warn me that I have encountered an evil spirit. He may even name the spirit to me. The process works through contact or proximity.

This gift does not work when I watch a video. To understand why, we need to understand what is happening when I watch a video of a church meeting. For example, if two people that are controlled by a spirit of deception come to a church and misbehave, the deceiving spirits will go home with them at the end of the night. If the spirits are restless and looking for a new home, they are most likely to enter a vulnerable people attending the meeting. They are not likely to enter the video that is being recorded. If one were to attach itself to a copy, it would be unlikely to be the one that I am watching.

So when I watch the video recording in my living room, the only evils spirits present will be those that I have allowed into my house (hopefully none). The spirits of deception will not be there, because they went home with the people they controlled.

So what will the Holy Spirit discern when I am watching the video? Nothing, unless I have allowed an evil spirit into the room. The spirits that the people on the video carried are not present so the Holy Spirit will not discern their presence.

When I watch a video of a church meeting, I can judge what I see. I can test it against my experience, or against scriptural standards, and decide that I will not like what I see, or I may decide that it looks okay, but that is not the same as discerning the spirits present.
I may receive a word of knowledge. The Holy Spirit might say, “What happened is wrong”. That is a valid form of knowledge, but it is not the gift of discerning spirits.

When we watch a video of meeting to decide what is happening, we should be careful how we describe our judgement. We should not say that we have used the gift of discernment to decide that evil spirits were present at the meeting.

Spontaneous v Deliberate?

In a post called Patterns in Personal Prophecy, Gene Redlin describes how he hears and delivers personal prophecies. His bullet points are worth digesting. I like his emphasis on achieving precision in hearing and delivering what God is saying. Precision is an important value for prophetic people, because truth is important and there has been too much prophetic mush masquerading as prophetic truth.

Gene contrasts “rapid fire” prophecy with a quiet, more measured, style that he often uses and concludes that one is not better than the other. I find this interesting, because the modern church tends to assume that spontaneous prophecy is more accurate. There is no biblical basis for this view. The Holy Spirit can do both, and he is free to choose how he will operate in any situation. To shake us out of our comfort zones, he will sometimes be spontaneous, when we want to be deliberate, and he will often be more deliberate, when we want to be spontaneous.

The benefit of a spontaneous word is that the Holy Spirit can drop it into our hearts unexpectedly, before our minds get going and before the flesh starts getting in the way. This is fine for beginners, but it not the basis for developing into a prophetic ministry. The person who wants to be used by God in prophecy must learn to quiet their minds and put their flesh to death. They must learn to distinguish between their own thoughts and the voice of the Spirit. This is difficult and takes time, but essential for developing a prophetic gifting. Relying on the Holy Spirit to beat our minds with spontaneous words is not a long-term solution.

The Holy Spirit loves to surprise us, so he will continue to give us words when we are not expecting it, but we must never fall into the trap of thinking that spontaneous words are superior to those that are received in a more deliberate, careful process. Clinging to the spontaneous will keep us locked in immaturity. Those who want to be used in prophecy will need to work hard at learning to shut out their own mind and flesh and deliberately and carefully seek the words of the Lord.

Sometimes precision is worth waiting for. At a meeting I attended recently, it took nearly a whole day for a few prophets to pray for less than twenty people, but the quality of the words was amazing.

Pearls take time to polish:
Mush tends to gush in a flush.

Prophets and Apostles

There are three reasons for a prophet and apostle (or other leader) working together.

• The prophet gives vision and direction.

• The prophet challenges the apostle if they take a wrong turn or go in the wrong direction.

The third reason is more challenging. A key role of the prophet is to protect the people from the apostle. Apostles are dangerous. Most of the people around them have blessed by them or discipled by them, so they tend to look up to the apostle. This means that an apostle is often surrounded by “Yes men”, not because they are devious, but because they love and respect the apostle so much. An apostle needs someone bold enough to challenge them if they are mistaken. That task will usually fall to a prophet. Nathan took this role for David. Barnabas for Paul.

When a prophet colludes with the apostle to attack some of the people, it gets dangerous. When a prophet starts firing the apostle’s bullets, he becomes a pet prophet. This is a risk that all prophets working with an apostle need to guard against.

Travelling Prophets

When pastors are sent out to establish a beachhead in the enemies territory, they become apostles. The church needs apostles and pastors.

Pastors are local
Apostles are mobile.

Apostles and pastors both need prophets alongside them. Pastors of local churches need prophets to feed holiness into their church. Apostles need prophets to ensure their new work is built on a solid foundation.

Some prophets will be local, working with a pastor.
Other prophets will be mobile, working with an apostle.

A common view is that prophets are people who float from place to place as itinerant ministers, who give words to individuals and organisations, but do not have a leadership role. However, there does not seem to be a role for independent mobile prophets in the biblical model. According to early church history, groups of travelling prophets lost the plot and eventually became a burden on the church.

Fullness of Israel

Most Christians are waiting for Jesus to return and establish the Kingdom of God. This is a false hope, as Jesus has “finished” his work on earth (John 19:30). He has already done everything that he had to do to establish the Kingdom. He will return at the end of the age to receive a Kingdom that has been established and operating for many years (1 Cor 15:23-25).

Responsibility for establishing the Kingdom of God has been assigned to the Holy Spirit working through the church. He has been unable to complete this task, not because he is incapable (as most Christians believe), but because a key part of his team is missing. During the Times of the Gentiles, the children of Israel are shut out of the gospel. This means that the church is not at full strength. Worse still, it gives the devil authority to continue working on earth.

The next big event in history is not the second coming of Jesus. The next big thing is the fullness of Israel. During a time of distress on earth, the Holy Spirit will move on the hearts of the children of Israel (Zech 12:10), causing them to come to faith in Jesus in a great flood (Rom 11:26). This will remove the last obstacle to the kingdom. Satan will be stripped of his authority, and the Holy Spirit will expand the kingdom of God rapidly, until the glory of God covers the earth, as the waters cover the sea (Hab 2:14).

Now if their fall is riches for the world,
and their failure riches for the Gentiles,
how much more their fullness (Rom 11:12).

All this happens while Jesus is sitting in heaven at the right hand of the Father.

One reason I went to Jerusalem was to look for signs that the fullness of Israel is getting close. There are a few hopeful signs of life, but not many. Most of the Jewish people seem to be pushing hard into orthodox Judaism, or fed up with religion altogether.

What they see of the gospel is not that appealing, as many of the Jewish messianic churches are just dull clones of western institutional churches.

I realise that the outpouring of the Spirit will come on Israel during a time of distress, but the Holy Spirit will need groups of Christians to work with him in teaching millions of new Christians how to live in Jesus. These Christians will have learned to support each other through distress and trouble without financial support from the outside. They will have a prophetic edge to their preaching.

Many Christians have moved to Israel to pray and celebrate Jewishness, but few seem to be ready for sharing the gospel during a season of distress. I met one young man who has established several house churches, which are growing rapidly, but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Unfortunately, most Christians in Israel tend to be sycophantic rather than prophetic. As my host in Jerusalem explained, Christians living in Israel tend to be envious of the Jews, and want to be more like them, whereas God’s purpose is that the blessing of living in the Spirit would be so great that the Jewish people become envious of us.

We are getting close to the times when God is going to pour his Spirit out on the people of Israel. The Holy Spirit will do the tough stuff, but he will need Christians to help him. Christians in Israel should be forming spiritual commando armies to help him at this critical juncture in history. The going will be tough, but the result will be blessing for the entire world. I hope that some of the Christians with a passion for Israel will hear the voice of the Spirit and take up this call.

Getting the Bug

When we returned from Israel, a friend asked me this question.

Did you get the bug?

The answer is “No”, but I do understand the question. Over the last thirty years, I have seen a number of Christians develop a real passion for Israel (sometimes to the point of obsession) that other Christians cannot understand. I have never felt that passion. I am very interested in Israel, for the reasons that I will explain in tomorrow’s post, but I have never felt any urge to visit the country, so I was intrigued that an opportunity arose. It was interesting to see the country with my own eyes, I am still committed to praying that God’s purpose will be accomplished for the Jewish people, but I am still a dispassionate observer. The bug passed me by.

I do not have the bug, but I do have a theory. Jacob had twelve sons, who became the twelve tribes of Israel. After the reign of Solomon, the kingdom split in half. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin became a southern kingdom ruled from Jerusalem called Judah. The other twelve tribes became a northern Kingdom based on Samaria. Ahab was the ruler of the northern Kingdom. I Kings 17 gives the history of Hoshea, the last King of Israel in Samaria. Like his predecessors, he did evil and lost the protection of God. The King of Assyria invaded the northern kingdom and deported the people to Assyria.

The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They took over Samaria and lived in its towns (2 Kings 17:24).

The southern Kingdom called Judah persisted for several more generations. When they continued to disobey god, they were eventually conquered and deported to Babylon. The difference was that after a few hundred years in exile, the people of Judah returned to their land under the leadership of Nehemiah and Ezra. In contrast, the people of the northern Kingdom (the other ten tribes) never returned. When people eventually migrated out of Assyria to many parts of the world, those who were descendants of Jacob would have gone with them, and because the genealogies are lost, most of these people do not know that they are descendants of Jacob, belonging to one of the ten tribes of Israel. These Israelites will be spread throughout the world.

My theory is that those Christians who develop a passion for Israel, and feel compelled to serve and pray for Israel are actually descendants of the Israelites exiled to Assyria, who do not know it. The reason they are so obsessed about Israel is that they are part of Israel, and God is trying to reveal it to them.

My ancestors came from Scotland. After my visit to Israel, I am fairly certain that they did not get there by way of long vacation in Assyria, because I did not get the bug.

God is our Refuge

God really looked after us while we were in Israel.

We arrived in Jerusalem at about 10pm. The nesher taxi dropped us in a dark street up the hill from the hostel where we were going to stay. When we walked down the hill, we found that the gate was locked and we could not rouse anyone. When I phoned my contact, his phone was switched off and my calls went straight to voicemail.

We were standing in the dark street wondering what to do, when a young man approached asking us if we needed help. It turned out that he was a volunteer at the hostel. He had gone out for a walk, but because it was colder than he expected, he had returned early to get a jacket. He had a key and was able to let us in and help us find out beds. I told him that he was our rescuing angel. About half an hour after we got to bed, we got a txt from a blog reader, whom I did not know, saying that they had been praying for us. I was encouraged, as their prayers had already been answered when I received the text. Perfect timing.

We had flown to Israel via Seoul in South Korea. We were intrigued to read that North Korea had shelled a South Korean island, about the time we flew out of Seoul. We had not realised it at the time, but we needed God’s protection then too.

A couple of days later, when we were walking back to our hostel late at night with a group of people, my wife tripped on a step. I saw her fall head first down the steps, but could not catch her. I was amazed when she got up unhurt. That night we got another text from our friends saying that they were praying for us. The next day she did not even have a bruise, so I presume that an angel must have protected her from hitting the ground.

We travelled through Megiddo on the day when the fires took hold near Mount Carmel, but we did not see anything. So God kept us safe a third time, when we were close to danger.

Peace in the Lord

Much of the land in Israel is of little use for agriculture and not of much of value. I cannot understand why people are fighting for it.

Agriculture is not nearly as important for Israel as it was thirty years ago. The country has made quite a rapid switch to dependence on industry and commerce. Associated with this has been a massive urbanisation. Social and business life is now centred in the main cities.

A Jewish Christian told me that he has access to a lot of agricultural land, but he cannot find young people who are willing to work it. That is not surprising as the future for most young people with talent lies in the city.

This means that there is very little economic reason for establishing settlements on the West Bank. As we travelled down from Jerusalem to Jericho, we went past a wide road turning off to the right and travelling up a hill, the site of a new settlement. I cannot understand why anyone would want to live there. Nothing grows there. The view is lousy. The commute to Jerusalem would be long and slow.

The only logic for these settlements is “control” of the land and security. Unfortunately, military force and control of the land cannot provide security for those who have forgotten to trust and obey their God.

The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth (Deut 18:25).

The Lord is the only source of true peace and security.

Here is something interesting. When Israel entered into the land God, told them to destroy the high places.

Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains, on the hills and under every spreading tree, where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods (Deut 12:2).

The high places were sites for idolatry and symbolic of rebellion, like the Tower of Babel.

During the times of the prophets, kings were judged by how they dealt with the High Places. A common refrain in the second book of Kings is,

The high places, however, were not removed (1Kings 12:3 14:5).

This was the mark of a bad king.

They angered him with their high places;
they aroused his jealousy with their idols (Ps 78:58).

The prophets warned that the high places would be destroyed.

I am about to bring a sword against you, and I will destroy your high places (Ezekiel 6:3)

Israel is now intent on taking control of the high places again. They are not building idols there, but they are trying to find security independent of God, which is very similar. They may find that these high places are eventually destroyed, as Ezekiel prophesied.

Pilgrimage?

For many people, visiting Israel is a pilgrimage in which they get close to God. That was not the case for me. There are several reasons for this.

1. I am a Holy Spirit person. The Holy Spirit lives in me, so I can talk to him wherever I am, whether I am in the shopping mall or in Jerusalem. I do not need to go to a special place to get close to him.

2. Many years ago when I resigned from being a church minister, one of the main reasons was that I hated the religious system that dominates so much of the church. The problem in Israel is that every place of spiritual significance has a church or mosque plonked on it. Some places have a couple of churches from different denominations in contest with each other. Jerusalem must be the most religious place in all the world. The mosques cry out on the hour prayer and the churches challenge back with their loudly ringing bells and the orthodox Jews block their ears to voice of the "goyim".

3. The religious tourists are everywhere. Great queues pressing in to touch a holy stone. Other groups videoing themselves worshipping on the Sea of Galilee or walking the Via Dolorosa carrying a cross.

I had some great spiritual experiences in Israel. The highlight was being led to be in the right place at the right time to meet and help someone that I did not expect to meet. But that kind of thing can happen anywhere, if I keep walking in the Spirit.

I also enjoyed getting a better understanding over the lay out of the land. I now have a better idea of the distance Mary walked when going from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The last, long climb up into Bethlehem would have be really tough for a woman coming into labour.

I enjoyed staying beside the Sea of Galilee and getting a perspective on the distances between Nazareth, Bethsaida, Capernaum and other places that Jesus visited. It was interesting seeing the hills where he withdrew to pray. I can now understand better why he crossed the lake in a boat.

Visiting Israel was a good learning experience, but it was not a pilgrimage. Walking in the spirit is an everyday, everywhere pilgrimage that nothing else can match.

Milk and Honey

I now live in a city, but about thirty years ago lived in the country, quite close to where the following three photos were taken, so I know a land flowing with milk and honey when I see it.

I did not expect to see milk and honey, but I was really disappointed with the land of Israel. I did not expect lush green grass, but I was amazed at how barren and rugged the land has become. Much of it is close to being desert. Even on the coastal plain, I was surprised at how much of the land is covered by scrubby trees and plants.

I had read that the Jewish people had made the desert bloom. It is true that they have in places through irrigation and hydroponics, but that is limited by the availability of water.

The contrast with God’s word is amazing.

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills;a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing (Deut 8:7-9).

The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as in a vegetable garden. But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven It is a land the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end (Deut 11:10-12).

A better description of the current state of the land is in Deut 28.

However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands… all these curses will come on you and overtake you: The LORD will strike you with scorching heat and drought….The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed (vv 15,22-24).

The land is crying out to be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into freedom and glory when the children of God are revealed by the Holy Spirit (Rom 8:21).

Back on Deck

Early last week, we returned from a two week visit to Israel, where I attended a three day meeting in Jerusalem. Given that we had to travel half way round the world, about twenty-four hours in the air, we took an extra week to look around the rest of the country. My head is now in the same time zone as my body and my mind is clear, so I will start posting again tomorrow.