Stuart Branch FInstTA
Fellow of the Institute of Transport, Author, Writer, Poet.
United Kingdom

According to God’s word, Israel is a special land. Those, like myself, who have travelled there, know this to be true. The land looks special, feels special and is special. It is especially favoured and especially beautiful. It richly breathes Biblical history.

I would like to share here some highlights of my seven-day visit to Israel in November 1982.

I arrived at a time when the countryside was parched dry, and when you looked at what you thought were cornfields, you were actually seeing fields of sun-scorched grass. The Israelis had expected that the autumn rains might have come already, but they were late arriving that year.

On the very last evening of dryness, though, I can well remember, being keen on meteorology, the build- up of emotive altocumulus castellatus (shaped like castles), heralding the great seasonal change to come, for this cloud type are the forerunners of storms, they did not come that night, but, as it happened, on the next night, after we had returned to England. 

I am sure the whole nation would have welcomed those rains with much relief, and I felt strangely warmed and blessed to have received that foretaste of their relief, through those wonderful signs in the sky, which I can still visualise, even today.

Who cannot love Jerusalem-the city of the great King David?

Whereas the rains described in Genesis, in Noah’s day, brought terrible floods, these rains, falling across the Golan Heights, Galilee and beyond, would have brought wonderfully refreshing revival and greenery back to the whole land, causing excitement and rejoicing. I would have liked to have entered into the jubilation of it all!

I loved Jerusalem. Who cannot love Jerusalem—the city of the great King David? I planted a prayer in the Western Wall, and said one, too, where, high above me, the Jewish people were celebrating the Festival of Booths, Sukkot, in lovely, meaningful, palm-lined arbours on the flat roofs of their houses. 

I found the area around the Western Wall touchingly beautiful, an open space, surrounded by history, buzzing with tourists and devout, earnest, pleading Jews praying to God.

I loved the views across to the Mount of Olives, at a 3000-foot altitude— an ageless vista, rugged, impressive and vast, steeped in both ancient and restored miraculous wonder! That is Israel. It is different, symbolically amazing.

I loved the blueness of the Mediterranean throughout Tel Aviv’s huge, long, thin metropolis and all along the coast, past pretty, golden-beached Netanya to steep, ancient Jaffa.

I planted twelve trees with a small trowel in the Judean foothills. By doing so, I planted another piece of future Israel! May God bless visitors as they continue to do the same!

I was very impressed with Mount Tabor, the way it rises up above an immense plain, and was equally impressed by the sheer size of the massive lizards sunning themselves on the heights of Megiddo, provided they were not about to move in my direction anytime soon! 

A chosen land, and a holy nation.

I visited a Jewish family to whom I gave gifts and felt a wonderful love and joy flow between all of our group and all of them as we parted with “Shalom! Shalom!”

I found the Sea of Galilee more than charming and mountainously magnificent, its serene, lakeside backdrop ever-changing, its wildlife teemingly abundant! The slopes of Mount Hermon, snow-capped at 8000 feet above us, with Galilee’s Lake glimmering at 1000 feet below, were unforgettable.

I bathed in the cool, inland springs of Sachne, set among rugged rocks and palms, and I also soaked— all but my eyes—in the 100 degree Fahrenheit, salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea, 1314 ft below sea level, to wash off grungy applications of black, gooey, anti-rheumatic mud, with picturesque mountains, rising above me— still below sea level!— and with certain parts of my body stinging with the salinity of the water! 

I was thrilled to cover so much ground in Israel in my short time there. It is a chosen land, and a holy nation, being ever more and more wonderfully blessed and restored. The best is yet to come!

Any who visit that blessed Land are assured of God’s blessing too!