Sandra Glahn's blog

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I'm writing from Jerusalem after a day where I walked where Jesus walked. Wow.

It's my first trip. I have so many memorable impressions. For starters, Israel is both larger and smaller than I expected. The entire country is the size of Maryland--way smaller than my home state of Texas. The distance from the Mount of Olives to the Dome of the Rock is much smaller than I imagined, but the distance across the Jezreel Valley/Magiddo is greater. I also didn't realize that a part of the Wailing Wall was for women. All the photos I had seen were of ultra-orthodox men.

The first time I met Catherine Larson, we were sitting in the back seat of a van full of journalists. We discovered almost instantly that we both had a heart for Rwanda. The husband of one of my students had lost six family members in the genocide, and Larson had landed her job at Prison Fellowship writing a story about the war-torn country.

Recently I received an email about a Christian unmarried woman considering the use of donor sperm to conceive a baby. Another woman who heard about it suggested a solution: the church should hunt down a man for the unmarried woman to marry.

Um, no.

Some years ago I took a course in the historical books of the Bible. One of my assignments was to make a chart of the kings of Israel and Judah. I listed whether they were good or bad and in what ways they were weak. With only a handful of exceptions, I noticed that even kings who started out great usually fell hard later.

The same day the news announced “Katrina Leaves Dozens Dead,” my server’s news rotated this headline as an equivalent top story: “How did Jessica, Denise and Others Get So Slim and Fit? See Their Secrets.”

Think maybe our culture has messed-up priorities?

Want more evidence? Americans spend more than $8 billion annually on cosmetic surgery. But it’s not just this side of the Atlantic where we're forking over cash. The Scotsman reports that four in ten teenage girls in the UK consider plastic surgery.

If you ever have to plan a leaders' retreat, here are some ideas. Feel free to add your own suggestions at the end.

Fewer than forty-eight hours ago, I returned home from a two-week trip through Turkey and Greece visiting the sites of the seven churches of Revelation and following the journeys of Paul. We went to the seven ancient church sites as well as Istanbul, Aphrodisias, Patmos, Corinth, Troas, Neapolis, Philippi, and Athens. 

Nearly fourteen years ago, my husband, Gary, celebrated his first Father’s Day with the arrival of our eight-month-old, dark-haired, blue-eyed baby girl. Her adoption is a fact of our lives together that we have, from the beginning, all discussed openly and with enthusiasm.

In modern cities when a woman goes into labor, relatives squeal, cheer, and celebrate. But in first-century Ephesus, the response would have been much different. Think terror. Childbirth in the ancient world carried legitimate fears of writhing and death—as is still true in much of the developing world today.