Day 11: Beauty Of Times Gone By

Fig trees.  White sandy dust.  Olive groves.  Sandals.  Paphos.  The Mediterranean. Pomegranates.  Everything in Cyprus brings Biblical themes and stories to mind.  I mentioned this to my friend Anna, who grew up first in Egypt and then in Cyprus, and she agreed at first.  After a pause she added, “Actually I’m not sure what to say when people tell me that, because my whole life has been surrounded by these things.” For her, visiting the Nile River or going for a dusty walk in sandals was part of life.  For me, walking around Cyprus still captivates my imagination and brings the Bible just a little bit closer to home. 

Today I wandered the edge of the Akamis Peninsula in Cyprus.  All of these things were present - the dust, the olive trees, the blue of the mediterranean.  It was boiling hot, and we longed to cool our feet in the clear springs of Aphrodite's Bath.  There were signs posted warning us not to swim - probably because of this restriction, I've never seen waters so clear.  And cold!  On one side you have the white-hot dust that you don't want to walk on without shoes, and on the other a sharp coldness in the water that takes your breath away.  We swam, later, in Adonis' Bath - another area entirely, where you're permitted to swim, but many don't because it's heart-stoppingly freezing.  We did though - or at least, I did, and I persuaded Anna to walk in halfway before she ran out shivering.  It was the kind of cold that actually takes your breath away, where you try to plunge beneath the surface but come up in seconds gasping for air, as though you'd been down for hours.  

I'm fascinated by this kind of beauty, because it stirs at my soul and awakens thoughts and ideas and stories that often only hover in the unknown.  It helps me understand what it really meant for Jesus to wash His disciples' feet; to see Paul, embarking on a ship from the island of Cyprus; to really 'see' verses like the one we sang in church yesterday - "But I am like a green olive tree flourishing in the house of God" (Psalm 52).  I remember reading a book once written by a shepherd.  He went through Psalm 23 explaining every single aspect of it, describing how sheep act and what shepherds do and how a sheep's enemies come in and what a day is like - and by the end of it you realise that the Bible is not just a combination of some very good stories: it is perfect and complete in every intricate detail.  It's not just true; it's true in a way you can't even imagine, and the more you know the more right it is.  Walking on the hills of Cyprus brought this to mind today, and the beauty of the Word of God strikes with deeper intensity the more you read it. 

Walk on - and read on!