Monthly Archives: September 2010

Sep 19 2010

King David harp bridge

This is the King David Harp bridge, which is almost finished.

When I say its almost finished, the bridge carries the lightrail train which is very behind schedule.  The structure of the bridge is all fine, just the rails and the overhead electric system is not operational.  You can see  that the trains curve around this house on the right then up over another busy main road.

I was past here  the other day as I was with a colleague dropping of food packages to some needy local people in apartments around the corner from here, mostly elderly holocaust survivors.

Its a unique and interesting idea.  I am wondering if the wires have to be tightened or adjusted sometimes.   Who remembers the problems with the wire bridge that goes across the Thames in London? 🙂

More interesting information on this modern Jerusalem monument here.

Sep 14 2010

Strikes in Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport & Jesus the blue collar worker

Strikes.

Us British and the French are probably the world leaders at it.   French truck drivers block ferry ports every so often, I had a one day trip to Bayeaux messed up by truckers making Cherbourg traffic come to a standstill.   The British did it a lot, quite often with the car industry, which probably made quality control in the 70s/80s with cars go awry sometimes.

Usual thing: stick an oil drum out in the car park and dress up warm as its winter in some gloomy West Midlands factory estate and make a fire and have plenty of logs and banners and make as much fuss possible when you have a fall out with your employers.  I am sure there are times where management does things which are unfair or take advantage of staff and something has to be done sometimes.

But this week quite big surprise with Israel’s main Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport on strike this week, over rows on pensions.

http://www.jpost.com/VideoArticles/Article.aspx?id=187966

The BBC are planning to go on strike too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11281410

This made me think of some things of late.

Yeshua (Jesus) was a blue collar worker.

He was a carpenter, I guess his pre-ministry secular work probably just consisted of a team of him and his step father Yosef.    The scriptures don’t say much about his pre-ministry career which must of been between after Bar Mitzvah (13) until his was 30.  Of course there was times he spent his teenage years in a synagogue preaching quite often.   As my grandad was a carpenter, I think it would of been great to of been a fly on the wall at the carpentry shop and see what went on in early days.

“Need to pop out and get new blades for the plane, some bits of Two-B’four, nice set of occasional tables for the palace to be done by thursday week, they specified top notch finish with dove-tailing and pale olive coloured teak staining.  Today garden trellis to be done for Mrs Cohen round the corner.  Busy at the end of the month, go on site and fit window frames for the Romans, they are having an extra sauna house put in…”

I would bet Yeshua would of been a good person to have around if there was some kind of industrial action.  Rather when floor workers grumble about their bosses as making conversation in the staff lounge or on the way home, Yeshua was a man of substance in getting things done and resolving conflict.  If Yosef’s carpentry Ltd was with a bunch of other chippies * and builders doing a contract for a major house build in Capernaum, and they thought their bosses were pulling a fast one *, Yeshua would be standing in between the middle of the picnic benches during a lunch time with the other workers not happy in a circle around, put his cup of tea on a table, and with pencil behind ear would of directed the workforce into praying for their employers, given advice to the whole team (and a quiet word to the bosses) over how to make work tolerable again.   Being an Israeli, talking loud and waving your arms a bit helps getting attention.   He would of shown kindness and empathy with those given the crushingly hard news of a redundancy.

Yeshua was quite blunt.   He got cross and said “Why have you turned my father’s house into a market?” –  John 2 : 16 He gave the Pharisees a good telling off when they told him he couldn’t heal a sick man on Shabbos.  Matthew 12 : 2

Yeshua was kind with those timid or not so popular.   Like Zacchaeus whose short height gave him difficulty being able to see the Lord speaking had to climb a tree.   See Luke 19 – 1:10 Christ told him to come forward in a gentle and encouraging way.

He ate with tax collectors and sinners: – Matthew 9 : 11 The workers who awkwardly sit on their own in the corner of the cafeteria, not fitting in with the cliques of the more established teams, Yeshua went and had fellowship with.

He was kind and compassionate.   He did miracles too. – Matthew 9 : 6

'Then he said to the paralytic, "Get up, take your mat and go home." And the man got up and went home. When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to men.'

Incidentally: I see this gent often on crutches begging in the middle of the Shuk open market here in Jerusalem.   He always makes me think of this verse.

If Yosef’s carpentry shop Ltd didn’t get their invoices settled on time from the local municipality, because the woman who does the cheque writing was off on holiday and the management were too disorganised to have someone to sort it out in the interim, I think Yeshua would find away to politely get the payments paid pronto.  He would of calmed down the factory floor and sorted out fall outs between the teams and no ‘them-and-us’ type shenanigans between the different ranks.

* I have used some localised English slang.  For the benefit of my non-English friends please click the link for an explanation 🙂


Sep 13 2010

This week Rosh HaShana, happy 5771!

Rosh HaShana is a festival celebrating Jewish New Year and gives us 2 1/2 days off work, hooray!

I went to a Messianic congregation (a synagogue with Jews that believe in Jesus)  with some friends.  The service is in Hebrew, so I didn’t understand much as I know about 15-20 words but its nice to see the Shofar being blown and join in with the worship (well hum along at least 🙂 )  and chat to some of regular people there.

The next day, on the way out to town, I decided to do some fruit picking.  Grabbing some Pomegranates.  There is some in a row of trees between the two lanes of traffic in a main road near my house.   These ones in a outskirts of a car park near the Zion Hotel.

The fruits I got were nothing special, they were quite small and not that sweet.  There were some bigger, more red pomegranates on the other bushes but most of them were rotten.

I think all the pomegranates I see in the UK for sale in say, Tesco are all imported from from Israel and cost about 1.50 each.

Near the abandoned railway station there is a path that goes between roads, its marked up Bible Hill.

At the top of the hill looking back onto the abandoned station, there are some ruins of a house there.   There is a couple of houses, one of them as lots of junk outside including this wrecked car which looks like an early 1980s Alfa Romeo.  Strange place to find it, as I don’t think a working car could easily get up this steep hill.

I went to the Kotel with my friend Donald from Scotland as its his last day before he goes home.   We took a shortcut through the Damascus gate, as it then around 8pm, its incredibly quiet around the old city as it is both Jewish New Year and also the end of Muslim festival of Ramadan.  From the picture you can see the strings of lights here for Ramadan, not many places are open and its quiet.

The Kotel (Western Wall) is fairly busy as well there.

Lastly, this poster seen in the Arab quarter was quite interesting on the way home.   Issa is Arabic for Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew)  I think its quite common and doesn’t have much significance to most Arabs though.

Sep 9 2010

The Hurva Synagogue

Last week I was in the old city and I went past the famous Hurva Synagogue.

This building was rebuilt and finished in March 2010.   I wanted to go inside, but its only open to the public in the mornings with a groups with a guide.

Following the destruction of this building in the 1948, initial plans for this current synagogue were drawn up in 2000 but the building was not finished until this year in March, about the same week I arrived to do my second season of volunteer work here.   Looking at pictures of the previous synagogue (its been destroyed and rebuilt quite a few times now)  it looks a pretty close copy of the original.

There was a lot worry from possible attacks from Arabs thinking that this a starting point towards building the third temple.   Frequent amounts of history revisionism tries to hide a lot of what has been in this country from the past.  You can click on this photo of a plaque to see this closer.   I think this is a nice icon of the determination of the Jewish people to protect their capital.

Sep 9 2010

Burning of Korans. Yeah smart plan from some Christians….

In the news, some Christians from Florida want to burn Korans as a way of remembering 9 years since the 9/11 attacks.

The guy in question is called Terry Jones who has set up International burn a Koran day.   I was thinking is this a reuniting of Monty Python doing some Islam themed sketch?   Alas not.

Really would this be something that Jesus would approve of?   Are Muslims, even the secular ones or those disillusioned with an Islamic upbringing going to turn around and say, good job chaps, I will think I will give my prayer mat and Arab tunic to local cat shelter charity shop and do something different?

This act is just dangerously provocative and will encourage responses from Muslims that could lead to people killed or property destroyed.  Probably those that Christians living in already hostile parts of the world.

I would welcome it if a case where a whole town came to Jesus and burned books from a Satanic cult they belonged to.   Indeed I have seen non-nutter Christian do burning of occultic, pornographic or other material, this is more of a personal decision to get rid of material from a previous destructive lifestyle, and make a statement in doing something new, embracing Jesus as their saviour.

You often see militants in Arab nations on TV burning flags of the US, Israel, or more recently Denmark because of the cartoon fiasco, I also remember when I was young people outside WH Smith burning copies of a book written by Salman Rushdie, as well as burning of books (not just religious and political) by the Nazis.   Attempting to imitate this practice just seems childish and pointless.  I hope Terry Jones can live with himself if Christians are persecuted as part of a revenge act.

Please pray that this will not cause revenge attacks and that this gathering of Christians doing some unhelpful will be called off, and that Muslim people will turn away from Islam and find Jesus.

Sep 8 2010

Galilee road trip part 3 : Miracles of Jesus on location

Parts 1 – 2 – 3 – more soon…

Back to continue the camping trip I did in the Galilee in May.  The towns surrounding this lake are where Jesus spent most of his ministry.

With the aid of a few supplies we took on our expedition, I decided to do some photos to recreate some of the miracles the Lord did on this very place.

Water into Wine.   As mentioned in John 2 : 9.  Jesus did this at a wedding in Cana which is a town some distance away from the west side of the sea, although I am the east side.

The sea and the coast can look quite foggy at times. The places where we camped has this amazing view, this wall is great to sit on and view until the sun goes down.

Five loaves and two fishes.  I have used some tinned pilchards, as I think using fresh fish in a car with 5 people and loaded with other stuff on a hot day would not be very a popular.

The scriptures here mention this was done by Jesus in a place called Gennesaret on the north west of the sea.  Check Matthew 14.

This sign is famous for its comedy value, I saw this is a park in a far up north part of Israel.  Some of my friends said they had seen this in national parks in other parts of the country.

The middle symbol looks like its saying ‘No walking on water’!

Parts 1 – 2 – 3 – more soon…

Sep 2 2010

In Sepia: Holyland pictures collection part 2

Part 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

more pictures as promised…

These are a little smaller as done with my old camera and some contain multiple shots stitched together.

These houses seen from the walls of the old city with mauve colours and curved walls show you can mix and match different styles, ie: the familiar white stones used on all Jerusalem buildings and a bit of art deco. 🙂

Cafe in Hillel Street, with Italian museum overlooking.

Mosque in old city only a few metres away from the dome of the rock entrance.

Apartments and mosaic on wall.

Part 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

Sep 2 2010

‘fake’ Christians

Seen this article in the news lately.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/08/27/almost.christian/index.html

I think its deeply wrong to label anyone as a fake Christian, and certainly there is often cases were people make hurtful assumptions which may or may not be true.  Here in Jerusalem, I know of Jews and Arabs that are believers in Jesus but often in secret because of being put in danger or being cut off by their families and communities or in more extreme cases with Arab believers, killed.  Often as Christians we avoid sharing our faith with non-believing friends, neighbours and work colleagues because of fear of ridicule or rejection.   This is something I had struggled with for a while, this is something that got easier over time, through encouragement from other people and just getting older and wiser.

There is confusion over what defines a Christian.  Often people may label themselves as Christians because of:

1/ They were brought up that way, 2/ They come from a country which this is assumed to be the ‘default’ faith is part of their identity, 3/Once went to church or sunday school, or went to an educational establishment affiliated with a church, 4/ Got baptised as a child.

I personally think that a true Christian:-

1/ Has made a personal decision to accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, 2/ goes to a church regularly, 3/ lives a life of integrity to try and follow the examples of Jesus.

Fallen away.   Often I hear of people who are or were Christians but no longer have a current relationship with God.   This can happen by circumstances such as a relationship with a non-believer, a weekend work schedule that means no longer regularly attending a church, sadness or disappointment over a loss like bereavement or relationship that has ended.   I think its important for us as Christians who know people like to keep in touch with those who may be absent from church, not to be forceful in telling them to come back, more to be a friend to those, and demonstrate through our actions that they are missing out on the love of Jesus.

Just like someone told me, just because you go to a church it doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

The media especially the BBC loves to show Christians as being frumpy, old fashioned and irrelevant.   A particular case I can think of is a group of Christian teenagers being asked questions about sex, explained how they had a different attitude that what conventional thinking would be of that of their peers in school and college, you could tell the presenters of the program thought they were boring and prudish.

The scriptures do warn us against being ‘luke warm’ (Revelation 3 : 16) and real Christians are obliged to meet together and have fellowship and be accountable (Hebrews 10 : 25) as sin is inevitably going to happen in our lives.

I think articles like this are far from being helpful or a true picture of Christians, but as true believers we should aim to show Christ through our actions and words.

Sep 1 2010

IT work in Jerusalem in August

This week work has been busy.

Fans.  Cooling fans in PCs in hot countries wear out a lot.  I changed one on my manager’s PC, the blades simply get stuck and won’t turn.  It seems the oil in the motor bearings gets gunged up and simply won’t turn any more.   I must of changed 15+ fans on PCs in the last year, on the CPU, power supply, chassis, video cards and one laptop as well.  Most of the time this is a off the shelf part and cheap and easy to replace bit.  In one case a fan on a motherboard chipset was a weird one and the only place I could get one (£7) was off ebay.  Well it seemed a shame to throw away an otherwise working motherboard, this fan came all the way from China and took 2 weeks to get here.  I swapped over the user with another PC straight away, so when this part arrived the PC was sitting on a bench to be fixed and then could be put back into a service for a new member of staff a month later.   Now the fan on my own office PC has packed in, so I will need to get another.  Normally they start making grinding noises, but this one has just stopped altogether.

I am making plans to virtualise a server used for our finance applications, as it seems quite awkward to manage it, and I have a feeling one of the hard disks in the RAID array is failing, so this will be done as an out of hours job, hopefully if everything goes to plan I only need 30 minutes in the office, the rest I can do by remote software from a coffee shop with laptop and wireless, the real pain with this kind of upgrade is waiting,  a trial run of this type of upgrade took 6 hours to copy files using Norton Ghost from the server to an extra hard disk.   Strip out all the hanging around and the job shouldn’t take more than one hour.

I got to go out and hand over one of the older computers I wrote on not long ago to a local family just a mile or so from our headquarters.

The girls seem to be pleased with their new acquisition.  After this, I got to spend the rest of the afternoon helping our Korean colleague Jey with his deliveries to the poor from the food bank.   Driving to various apartments of needy families with food was interesting as this took us over the north part of Jerusalem through a nice forest and places I have not seen before. Jey walks quite fast between the van and the apartments as he has to do a lot of drops and time is quite tight.

At least 3 of the people we visited were elderly holocaust survivors, a few having some full time carers staying with them who usually of Thai or Filipino origin who I see quite a lot in caring and nursing roles here.   One of the older gents who was 82 and originally from Poland invited us in and offered orange juice and cake and told us jokes and told us stories about he used to sing in his synagogue when he was younger.  This was a nice afternoon out of the office.