The Voice of Angels

Hello again! Today is Shabbat and we had an amazing day! Everything turned out much better than expected--it was just full of adventures and tender mercies! First of all, they are starting construction in the Center. We have glass EVERYWHERE and they need to replace a lot of it, so we have to move our Sacrament Meeting from the gorgeous room overlooking all of Jerusalem to our Forum room where I'm fighting to stay awake in Ancient Near Eastern Studies every day. I wasn't too excited about that, but then we went to church this morning and they let us have it in our special room still! That changed everything. It's infinitely better. We sang "Come Thou Fount" with our student choir--always amazing! Right after church and  meetings, we went to St. Anne's church by the Pools of Bethesda. It is definitely one of our favorite places already in all of Jerusalem and this was only our second time there. Something about the structure of the church building and the materials used make the acoustics absolutely outstanding. I really can't explain it, but it's something everyone should experience! We went and sang hymns with a small group. It's rare to get goose bumps in Jerusalem heat, but that definitely happened more than once. While we were there an Italian group came in and two girls sang "Amazing Grace," which was incredible too! The Pools of Bethesda are also way cool; you can walk down right up to the pool which is probably 20 feet under ground.  The stones are from the time of Christ, so it's incredible knowing that we literally walked along the same path as the Savior.
From there we went to the Garden of Gethsemane. This was my (this is now Liz) first time there.  Unfortunately, they didn't let us into the private side this time that Sara went to before, and the public side was pretty packed, but that doesn't mean it wasn't cool there!  In that same area is the Church of All Nations, so we walked through that as well.  You know the picture of Christ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the first one to come to your mind?  That's legitimately what it looks like there, it's so real! Ya--we live in Jerusalem :)