The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Done...

"Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.
Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority,
or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right.
For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.
For what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God."

--1 Peter 2:12-15, 20


The following post is serious. I'm not joking around or glorifying what I did in any manner, but I believe that anybody who reads my blog should know about this and can hopefully learn from my mistakes. For this reason, I've spared some of the gory details, but you should be able to get the general idea.

As a part of our general "Land and the Bible" class field trips through the old city of Jerusalem, we walked around the eastern perimeter of the old city, which is also the eastern wall of the Temple Mount and is in the area of an old Muslim cemetary. Along this wall is the Golden Gate, a hence blocked up gate under which we learned were the remains of an older gate that had been accidently discovered by a Hebrew University student in the 70's and has since been paved over and inaccesible. However, we noted a rock that could be lifted out of the area directly in front of the gate, exposing a small cavern below.

Last Tuesday night, my roomie Ry, three other IBEXers (who will remain unnamed) and I foolishly decided to try to explore this cavern more while our class was staying in Jerusalem overnight. In the process of widening the hole in order to take better pictures, we were spotted by Arabs on top of the wall right above us and were subsequently arrested by the Israeli police. Although there were no handcuffs involved, we were taken to the police station next to the Western Wall, which thankfully (providentially) was 20 feet from where the rest of our group was meeting for a tour of the Western Wall. Thus we were able to get the attention of Bill, who helped immensely in talking to the policemen since only one seemed to know English well. After several very scary hours of questioning, paperwork, being searched, and a transfer to another police station, we were released with a stern warning. The police did not press charges when they realized we were not some sort of political activists trying to defile Muslim bones (the cavern we were tampering with turned out to also be a grave). However, they helped us realize that the political tensions as well as the proximity of our little "excavation" to the temple mount (within feet of the eastern wall) added up to make our idea (which we initially thought was at best questionable) a very foolish one indeed.

The thing that I regret the most was that the Police knew that we were Christians. When I was being searched, my pocket Bible was of great interest to them since it possibly pointed to a religious motivation for my actions. Although we assured them that we had no political or religious motivations to do anything against the Muslims, it is most shameful to me that our actions were done under the name of Christ. How could I make such a blunder? I who am praying daily about the possibility of going into full-time Muslim missions? I hate the stench of my hypocrisy. Praise be to Jesus Christ, who is faithful to forgive me no matter how often I spit in His wonderful face.