Why am I going?

The story of how I got to be going to Jerusalem is a gradual progression of events. I haven't often felt particularly "called" to anything in my life. I've never woken up in the morning and felt as if I just had to do something. Instead, my life has always unfolded through gentle feelings in certain directions. The path I have chosen has sort of just fallen into place, although it didn't really seem as if it was when I was in the process.
When I graduated from North Park in May, the only thing I knew that I wanted to do was to travel and learn a language. At that time, I had been looking into South America, because Spanish was the only language I had any sort of grasp on and I thought it would be the easiest to learn. But as I looked at programs, I found myself more intrigued by the places in the Middle East to which they would send people, rather than places in South America. From where did this intrigue come? For that story, I will have to go back even farther than this Spring.
going to CBC and studying Biblical Studies at North Park, I was naturally drawn to going to Jerusalem and the surrounding area in order to see places that I studied and to experience the culture from which the Bible came. That is what first drew me to this place, but more was soon to follow and perhaps even outweighs the rest.
Besides knowing about the Biblical places, my knowledge of the Middle East until college, mostly consisted of the vague references I heard about it on the knews. All I heard about was unrest and terror. The conflicts seemed confusing, so I mostly stayed out. The picture I got from the new seemed to me a hopeless mess of neverending violence. The last half of my second year at North Park, I decided to become a history major, a huge and random step for somebody who hadn't taken a history class since her 10th grade year of high school. So my junior year of college, I began my history major. One of my first classes was a class on the Ottoman Empire. For those of you who don't know, the Ottoman Empire controlled a large portion of the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe from the years 1453 to 1922. It finally came to an end with the end of WWI and much of the problems that occur there now stem from that period of time. What struck me most from that class was the beuty of Middle Eastern culture. The knowledge I gained, totally abolished my stereotype of a vast wasteland of violence. I will let my naivete show and admit that I was surprised to realize that Middle Eastern history is full of thriving cultures. My intrigue stuck and I kept learning in every history class that I took. I finished my history degree with a paper on the School of Baghdad. The School of Baghdad was a group of scholars that was responsible for preserving knowledge from Latin philosophers and also coming up with new ideas in math and medicine and much more. This happened while Europe was in the Dark Ages. If it hadn't been for scholars in the Middle East, we might not even have some of the ideas of Aristotle or Plato, or even our numerical system. Through all of this study, I came to realize that I had stereotyped the Middle East as a place where only something bad could happen. I instead found out that a lot of good had come from there and I should have nothing to fear.
That is how I became drawn to going somewhere in the Middle East. I knew that I hadn't even begun to learn Arabic, but I decided that I was young and there was no better time to start than the present. Once I decided that I should go where I really wanted, instead where I thought might be the easiest, I e-mailed a professor at North Park who is the director for the Center of Middle Eastern studies. This was a couple weeks after I graduated in May. He gave me some names of North Park students who were in Palestine for the summer. Through those people, I was connected with a lady who mentioned Sabeel in an e-mail. I looked them up on the internet and thought their program looked ideal. I e-mailed them towards the end of the summer. When I went back to Chicago, my professor at North Park helped me connect even more with Sabeel. I started reading about the specifics of the conflict going on in Israel-Palestine and was shocked by my own ignorance of what was going on.
I know that I have had and still have misconceptions about the Middle East and, more specifically, the conflict in Israel-Palestine. I know that others have misconceptions too. I know that there are misconceptions and stereotypes on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I want to go there so that I can bring awareness back here to people I know, because I firmly believe that it is only through awareness that we can break down stereotypes and build bridges between both sides. I know that when stereotypes blind my eyes, I am not looking at people as creations of God. I say that I am going to promote big concepts like promoting peace and reconciliation, but a lot of what drives me is my own battle with the stereotypes and misconceptions I have and trying to weed them out of my life.