JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM... 

Today Jerusalem experienced a dust storm that began in the morning; by late afternoon it looked like a heavy fog had settled over the city. The winds had shifted and were blowing fine particles of sand in from one of the deserts that surround Israel to the south and east. This is also the result of a drought that the region is currently experiencing;  although the winter months are normally cool and rainy, this winter they have largely been warm and dry.  A Jerusalem resident told us that droughts are not uncommon to this region. In the past, droughts were almost always followed by famine, which are not an uncommon feature of the Old Testament.  In the past much more so than today, the people that inhabited this land lived very much at the whim of the forces of nature, forces which were often a matter of life and death. Their inability to control nature helped them to develop an awareness of their dependence on God. Because we live in such an advanced technological era, we can sometimes think that we have mastered – or are capable of mastering – the forces of nature that dictated the lives of the generations that came before us. But whether we realize it or not, the reality remains the same – there is very little that we are really in control of. Only God is truly in charge of all things, and in the end we are just as much in need of God as all the people that came before us.