Where Am I?

One morning I found myself at Jacob’s Well, recalling that last Sunday’s Gospel reading was that very passage. I was over looking Corinth and the foundations of Damascus with Antioch behind me. Needless to say I was disoriented. I didn’t remember going to the Holy Land, and I was positive that Damascus was more than a stone’s throw from Corinth.

Here at Jacob’s Ladder, everything is named after some place in the Bible. Many of the villages are from Paul’s travels. We have been tasked with connecting some of these villages. Shovels mixed concrete, which buckets carried to its final resting place— a sidewalk stretching from Antioch to Corinth. This is an important task, since Corinth and Damascus are only connected to the other villages by a steep, washed out, dirt road. This sidewalk will enable much easier passage, and will make travel between Corinth and Antioch possible (especially during rainy season). Wheelchairs and mud don’t mix!

Building this sidewalk has been a blessing. I can already see the men and women here itching to get their feet on the newly laid, perfectly smooth, still-drying sidewalk. After lunch, we came back to a nice surprise: our sidewalk was freshly christened with two bare feet, with no culprit in sight. It was a hit and run! After some repairs, the sidewalk looked good as new. It will have a huge impact on this community, and many like it will soon be built: Jacob’s Ladder eventually hopes to expand from 30 houses to 110.

Our little sidewalk will enable a tremendous amount of grace, love, and happiness to flow between the residents of the two villages. We are only at the beginning of what the foreman foresees as a multiyear project: we are laying the connecting piece that will connect other future villages. This is a huge step for Jacob’s Ladder towards the future. The sidewalks at Jacob’s Ladder mean much more than those we walk on at home; ours are for convenience, theirs are for necessity. It is their highway, interstate, river…their JORDAN River! Like the Jordan, this sidewalk will connect the communities in this Holy Land, and I don’t mean the one in the Middle East.