Sunday Worship Service In Israel

It has been a long time since I posted anything about Israel. It was the Lord's Day and on our itinerary was a visit to an interesting place - Mount Carmel!

And so we climbed huffing and puffing, in Elijah's footsteps, up the steep mountain for several hours... oops, wrong country.

Ahem, I meant to say, the air con tour bus took us up Mount Carmel and we discovered that this Carmelite convent now stood on the hill.Anyway, we tried to find shade and settled down, and sang a few worship songs from our songbooks.Then the preacher (above) gave a short sermon, on the scripture text from 1 Kings Chapter 18, of course, about Elijah's challenge against several hundreds of Baal's prophets. And we also looked around to see where those altars could have been, and tried to imagine the fire of God shooting down from heaven to burn up the sacrifice.

Eeeps, that had better not happen while we were sitting on Mount Carmel!

I half-expected to see some big, black crater of some sort on the hill to show the remnants of that burnt sacrifice (must be a big one!) but nope, there was no sign of it. Well, perhaps the convent had been built over it, who knows.

An airbase was nearby, and I remembered lots of aircraft flying overhead as we had our simple worship. And then these two fellows also came striding along, and passed by. Er... what's that on your back... who are you two here to shoot?View from Mount Carmel.