Spirits were high as the 30 EMU students on the 2012 Middle East cross-cultural marched merrily into the Judean desert. Guides had assured them of a short and easy stroll from the Mar Saba monastery to a Bedouin encampment, where a feast supposedly awaited. Spirits remained improbably high as the route wound up and down one rocky, barren hillside after another, and then again and yet again, no end in sight.

At last, the weary, hungry group of students crested a final and particularly treacherous slope to arrive at the Bedouin camp, only to discover that the Bedouins had not quite finished cooking. In fact, they had not even begun; dinner would not be served for some time.

The sun was sinking fast, along with the temperature, and one could easily imagine serious discontent breaking out among the tired and now twice-deceived college students. Yet their moods stayed bright while they passed the time until dinner, chattering in small groups, entertaining themselves with complicated word games invented during their long hours of travel over the past weeks, rushing around with their cameras to photograph the haunting orange twilight on the rocky Judean hillsides they’d just straggled across.

There existed a special sort of intimacy in and among the group, a bond already formed through previous quintessential cross-cultural moments like this that can’t really be replicated anywhere back on campus. You have to be tired and sore and famished and stranded in the distant wastes of the Judean desert to experience and grow from this sort of thing – to be confronted with petty hardships, to weigh these against the real and persistent hardships of Palestinian life that you’ve spent the last month observing and participating in – and so to decide to enjoy this unexpected hour with friends before dinner rather than pout about an afternoon that’s gone off script.

And so went the group’s last night in Palestine, roughly at the half-way point of a trip that began in turbulent Cairo and ended in peaceful Rome, with significant focus on Biblical history, early Christianity, Jewish and Arab culture, and the ongoing conflicts in the Holy Land. The following morning would mark a significant transition, when a bus ride of a few short miles would carry them from the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel – on the other side of a tall concrete barrier with a name, purpose and symbolism that depend entirely on who’s talking about them.

Bridging the Concrete Barrier

Having spent the previous three weeks living with host families in Beit Sahour, while studying Palestinian culture and issues, the difficulties of life under Israeli occupation loomed large in the students’ minds that night. The existence of suffering in the world was no longer an abstraction; their new Palestinian friends’ determination to celebrate life rather than despair had become an inspiration. The students acknowledged their ignorance about the region before they had come to see it for themselves, and wondered how they’d talk about it once they got back home without sounding like “crazy activists.”

“No matter who you get in conversation with [in Palestine], they’ll bring up the occupation and how it affects their life. You can’t talk about any other issues without talking about that issue,” said Dan Sigmans ’12. “You can’t just not talk about it.”

Days earlier, the group had visited Hebron, where Jewish settlements in the heart of the West Bank’s largest city exist as a volatile microcosm of the larger conflict between Jews and Arabs. After touring the city with Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers, who support non-violent Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, several students met a Jewish settler studying to become a rabbi, who was eager to share his own very different take on life and purpose and justice in Hebron.

“That was the first time I realized how elusive truth was going to be on this trip,” said Aaron Erb ’14.

Bridgett Brunea ’14 said the rabbinical student’s enthusiasm for sharing his story revealed a human side to the settlers – and cast the conflict between the two into even more ambiguous light.

“They have lives and families and hopes and dreams,” she said. “But they’re doing these awful things to the Palestinians.”

Did Americans Do This Too?

On a different trip to Efrat, another Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the students met with a settler originally from Chicago who confronted them with the disconcerting observation that they too are settlers – isn’t the whole United States built on stolen land? Unable to offer any sort of reasonable rebuttal, the group had arrived at another waypoint of the Middle East cross-cultural: silent confusion.

“It’s hard for you to comprehend everything. It’s so emotionally draining,” said Hannah Swartz ’14.

There had been many such classic moments, and there would be more. They’d been through the lows, such as the unexpected necessity of crossing the Gulf of Aqaba on a ferry packed with hundreds of men from the region, when divergent cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality left EMU’s females feeling vulnerable. They’d been through the highs: the friendships they’d developed with their host families; the friendships they’d developed with one another; the time in Jordan when they’d sung a song together in a resonant stone chamber carved millennia earlier in the cliffs of Petra.

And they’d experienced the incredible weirdness of cross-cultural exchange: while climbing Mount Sinai, the group happened upon a band of Korean pilgrims singing a Korean rendition of “How Great Thou Art.” Several of the students joined them with American-style harmony in the chilly winter air on the slopes of a remote Egyptian mountain.

Aiming for Relationships

By mid-morning the following day, the bus had dropped the group off along a busy street just below Jaffa Gate and the yellowed stone walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Weighed down with backpacks and suitcases, they shuffled uncertainly down the sidewalk toward Jerusalem University College, where they would spend the next weeks of their trip studying Biblical history and geography. The bus roared off into traffic, the crowds on the sidewalk bustled around and through them, and a new moment had begun.

At this point in the trip it was tempting, said several students, to be judgmental, to not approach the people they’d encounter on this second half of their trip with open hearts and minds. It would be tempting, but they knew it would be wrong. They’d come to listen and learn, and they had been warned this might not be easy.

“My job isn’t to choose sides right now,” said Morgan Porter ’13, shortly after her arrival in Jerusalem.

As the group settled into their new surroundings, the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” occurred to Brunea with new meaning and urgency. Jesus would approach “the other side” with love, she said, and she would try to do the same.

“It’s a really awesome challenge for my faith. . . . I’m looking forward to the chance, to hear their stories and to recognize that this [land] is their home, too,” she said.

The group began its stay at Jerusalem University College with morning classes and afternoon tours of the Old City, later traveling throughout Israel to visit other significant Biblical sites. Following a period of free travel, they returned to Jerusalem to begin studying Judaism and contemporary Jewish issues, this time based at the Ecce Homo convent inside the Old City walls. A number of students identified their stay at Ecce Homo as the highlight of the trip’s second half, when their classes were regularly interrupted by ear-splitting calls to prayer from a nearby minaret. From the convent roof, they could see the grey dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque, perched on Temple Mount directly above the Western Wall, overlooked from the east by the Mount of Olives.

“It’s like no other place in the world,” said Sigmans.

On the Trail of Jesus

Later stops on the trip included a stay at a kibbutz in the Galilee and a four-day, 40-mile hike along the Jesus Trail (a trail tracing Jesus’ footsteps from Nazareth to Capernaum, co-founded by David ’04 — who was on the 2002 Middle East cross-cultural — and Moaz Inon, an Israeli friend of his). The cross-cultural concluded with study of early Christianity in Greece and Italy, before returning to EMU in late April.

As she had expected, Brunea found it difficult at points to sympathize with Israeli perspectives on the conflict. At the same time, she was surprised to encounter numerous Israelis hoping to find a just and peaceable solution to the problem.

“It was really energizing to learn how many people there are really working for good change,” she said.

Looking back on the entire cross-cultural, Swartz recalled her surprise at the hospitality Palestinians extended to her as an American, even as they criticized her government’s role in supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestine. During the second half of the trip, she realized that she also needed to separate individual Israelis from the actions of their government and military.

“People have been willing to forgive my ‘American-ness’, so I should be willing to forgive Israelis for what their government has done,” said Swartz.

This emphasis on individual relationships emerged as a major lesson for the students on the trip. After their return, several described newfound appreciation for human connections that exist between people and defy stereotypes, and that create a foundation of respect between people, even when they disagree with each other.

“I may not always like what people do to one another . . . but you have to be willing to see the humanness of [everybody],” Brunea said.

This was just one of several lessons with broad life implications the students brought home with them. After looking down on Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and hiking from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee, and standing on the shore where Jesus called his first disciples, they read the Bible with new eyes and a vivid understanding of its physical setting. Likewise, the region and its place in today’s world have come alive. Their ears perk up when a story from the Middle East comes on the radio; they read stories in the newspaper with greater interest and understanding.

Worldlier Outlook

“I feel like I care more about the world in general,” Swartz said.

A certain jadedness and frustration also accompanied the group home. The seeming intractability of conflict in the Middle East, and the toll it continues to exact on the people who live there, left the group feeling exhausted, even tempted at times to allow the easy rhythms of life at home to push their challenging and complicated experience from their minds.

“I don’t want to go back to where I was before I took this trip . . . but at the same time, how do you not feel so emotionally drained?” asked Swartz.

Before Porter spent a semester in the Middle East, she vaguely felt she wanted to be involved in “saving the world.” A few months in a particularly messy and tormented part of the world, though, led her to reevaluate the idea.

“I don’t have to save the world,” Porter said. “I can focus on [saving] one thing and be okay with it.”

Days after the group’s return – a frenzied time of graduations and goodbyes atop the stress of readjustment to life at home after a cross-cultural – Ellen Roth ’13 said she expects the experience will remain a lifelong influence. Seated in the coffee shop on campus, she said she has no idea whether her future life or work will involve her directly with the people and places she visited in the Middle East. She’s certain, though, that broader themes from the trip – appreciation for the simpler lifestyles of the people she met along the way, heightened sensitivity to injustice, new awareness of the effects of American policies elsewhere in the world – will guide her in the future.

“I definitely want it to influence how I conduct my life,” Roth said. “There are so many things [in my life] I want to reconsider.”

— By Andrew Jenner ’04. Read about his conflicted reactions to his 2002 Middle East cross-cultural.

After conducting interviews with current students in the Middle East in February 2012, reporter Andrew Jenner ’04 contacted alumni from earlier EMU-sponsored trips to the region.

In comparing the responses of current and former students, Jenner found that the “lessons” assimilated during this cross-cultural do deeply influence them, likely for rest of their lives. Of course, the students also bring home innumerable photographs, souvenirs and memories.

“As I reflect back on my experiences, all of my senses are affected,” says Ellie Barnhart ’11, who studied in the Middle East in 2010.

She remembers the taste of Arabic coffee and fresh pita in Nazareth, the fragrant marketplace in Jerusalem’s Old City, and the smell of the sea from a ferry on the Mediterranean. She hears the voices speaking in Arabic, English, Hebrew, Italian, and Greek; she recalls the cold, salty water of the Dead Sea on her skin and the smoothness of freshly polished olive wood in Palestine. She can close her eyes and remember the sunset on Mt. Sinai, and Jews praying at the Western Wall while Muslims knelt for prayer just above them, atop the Temple Mount.

“The experiences from the trip continue to impact me, whether I am reading my Bible, listening to the news, or even just talking with a friend over coffee,” says Barnhart, now working as a nurse in Salem, Oregon. “Sometimes it is in the most unexpected moments when one of my senses is triggered, and I am taken back to the Middle East.”

Thoughts and reflections collected from a dozen alumni of the Middle East cross-cultural over the decades reveal six major ways in which the trip influenced their lives.

1. Gaining better understanding of the Bible and insights into its relevance.

“Being in the Middle East made reading Scripture much more real,” says Ruth Ellen Dandurand ’10. “Now when I read the Bible, I not only have a picture in my mind of what and where it took place but also a deeper understanding of all the realities of each lesson. Each detail the Lord had written in his book was intentional to serve a certain purpose, to give a certain picture that sometimes is only possible to see clearly in the right circumstances of place, heart, mind, and culture.”

Eric Trinka ’07says the trip gave him exciting opportunities to “re-examine the Word of God in its geographic and historical contexts.” Trinka, who relinquished his job as a middle school geography teacher in Harrisonburg (Va.) to enroll at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in the fall of 2012, has returned to Israel and Palestine four times with a Virginia Mennonite Missions program.

In that role, Trinka worked to create a “curriculum for participants interested in studying the life of Jesus in the context of the first century while applying what they learn to the modern Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

“Each of these opportunities has exposed me to a wealth of information and experiences that have continued to nudge me in the direction of New Testament studies and a career in place-based, Biblical education,” he says.

2. Experiencing challenges to one’s faith.

An epiphany struck Rus Pyle ’03 as he lagged behind the rest of his group on Mt. Zion one day. “I came away with an understanding … that faith is something real and special and it can be crucial and central to our well-being. The power of belief can heal us in ways where other avenues may fall short.”

Bess Moser ’08 had the opposite reaction: “I was lost in the turmoil of the Holy Land…. Someone had flipped the light switch; there was darkness all around. Rage, anger, and confusion had consumed me….

“I had seen acres and acres of olive tree stumps and could hardly restrain myself from screaming. I had shed countless tears. I had stood on a hillside looking at a settlement and understood in my own heart what drives people to violence and deep hatred. I felt the weight of the world and its suffering on my shoulders.”

Moser says she wonders if she will regain the sense of hope and faith she lost as a result of what she saw in the Middle East.

Ruth Ellen Dandurand ’10 initially experienced a similar loss of faith, wondering if prayer had any power to make things better. “The Jews and Muslims and Arab Christians there pray! They pray all the time. You can see them praying when they’re walking down the street or kneeling on the floor in their shops or with their families .… But being there and experiencing just a small taste of what they have to live with all the time – so little has changed.”

After learning about the mistrust and violence that linger in the Middle East despite so many prayers, Dandurand was left with “an almost complete disbelief in the power of prayer.”

“Thankfully God has since healed that part of my faith and I have no doubt that He will continuously walk with us in the joys and trials of life.”

Ed Nyce ’86, media and education coordinator for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), recalls the way his experience illustrated lessons he’d learned growing up and in classes at EMU. As an example, he cites “the commitment to stand with the marginalized, to be ‘for’ the poor or disenfranchised without being ‘against’ anyone as a person created and loved by God, in the midst of working and struggling for change that challenges injustice.”

“I had a chance to see that in action in the West Bank through Palestinian, Israeli, MCC and other peacemakers we met. Such encounters stayed with me as I did peace work and further study after my EMU years.”

3. Maintaining lifelong ties to people and places from that time.

“[There’s] no better way to learn to live in a community than living with the same people for three months,” says Tanya Charles Shenk ’93, a nurse in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Joelle Hackney ’07, MA ’10 (conflict transformation), still treasures the relationships she built with her classmates on the trip, “most of whom remain dear, lifelong friends.”

“It has been almost 10 years since my trip and I still feel a deep connection to that part of the world,” says Rebekah Kratz Brubaker ’04, a social worker in Harrisonburg. “I find myself listening more intently when I hear news on the radio or television related to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict.”

Ben Stauffer ’01 says his reading choices reflect his Middle East sojourn. “I was going through some books in the last month and found Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothersand started to read it again. Many things I saw and learned about came back to me as I was reading. The people and issues of the Middle East will always have a special place in my heart.”

4. Grasping the complexity of multiple viewpoints in conflicts.

“[The cross-cultural] really opened my perspective on the world’s complex issues such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” says Ben Stauffer ’01, of North Lawrence, New York.

Jill Stoltzfus ’91 agrees: “From visiting an utterly miserable refugee camp in the Gaza strip to attending a Shabbat dinner at the home of a strongly pro-Israel Jewish family … I learned for the first time in my life how something can be viewed so differently depending on who’s doing the viewing.” Stoltzfus is now the director of the research institute at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

David Landis ’04, co-founder of the Jesus Trail in Israel, says his cross-cultural experience made clear the importance of “determining context within situations that seem black and white.” (.)

5. Becoming passionate about cross-cultural exchange.

“I learned how to be passionate about the world and its people. Before cross-cultural I knew little about the rest of the world and even less about the Middle East,” says Ruth Ellen Dandurand ’10. “I recognize the world now as one divided community that is in dire need of the love of Jesus to make it whole again.”

“[For me], the trip solidified the value of cross-cultural education, and that’s inspired us to stay involved,” says Anna Dintaman ’05 Landis, who helped develop the Jesus Trail with her husband, David, after her experience as a student on the cross-cultural in 2004. The two have since hosted recent EMU student groups on the 40-mile trail in Galilee and co-authored Hiking the Jesus Trail.

At times, the trip has also given participants a taste of the intolerance that persists in the Middle East, says Jill Stoltzfus ’91, whose heritage is Jewish on her mother’s side. “The fact that some Palestinian kids threw stones at me while I was walking in Old City Jerusalem one afternoon hammered home my Jewishness in a way nothing else did while I was in the Middle East. I experienced, if only briefly, what it must feel like to be hated so intensely by an entire group of people.”

The diversity of the people she encountered in the Middle East left a deep impression on Joelle Hackney ’07, MA ’10 (conflict transformation). Ones that stand out in her mind include a doctor’s assistant at the clinic who cared for her during an illness; a Palestinian woman left mute after her home had been destroyed four times; a young Israeli sniper, recently released from service and shaken by his experiences; the Israeli woman who reminded her of her mother and had lost her son in a bus bombing; the teenage Palestinian, born and raised in a refugee camp, dreaming of his grandparents’ land he had never seen; the man at the falafel stand who told her, almost at the point of tears, “Thank you so much for being here. Please, when you go home, tell the people in your country, tell your Mr. Bush, what is happening here.”

While attached to an IV in a Palestinian clinic when she was sick, a doctor told Hackney something that has remained with her since: Don’t be too quick to judge people.

“I had a hard time understanding exactly what he meant, until later in the cross-cultural,” she says. Then she met a rabbi who offered similar advice: Be careful to not make either side a victim or an aggressor in your mind.

“I began to see how desperately those working for peace, for a different way, were trying to break out of systemic identities of victimhood, persecution, and violence, imposed upon them by the outside world and also from within their own cultures,” Hackney continues. “They were desperately seeking an opportunity to re-narrate their own futures, to break a cycle of justification for violence and for hatred of ‘the Other.’” Hackney is the program coordinator at the Staunton (Va.) Creative Community Fund.

6. Shifting direction in life and career.

After finishing his studies at EMU, Rus Pyle ’03 entered the mental health field and now is a licensed mental health counselor in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Pyle works with an agency that uses meditation to address emotional conflict and addictive behavior.

“We work with an underserved and often ignored population: ex-offenders on probation and parole,” Pyle says. “This integration of spirituality, existentialism, application, and service to a marginalized community, all began while on the cross-cultural, and studying at EMU. Time and time again, I have looked back on the understandings and goals [that] began during my time in the Middle East not only with a sense of fondness, but a with a sense that my studies at EMU could not have been complete without them.

Ben Stauffer ’01, now working on his family’s dairy farm in New York, traces his decision to volunteer with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) to his cross-cultural. “I realized how rich we are here in the U.S. and I was definitely uncomfortable with that,” he says. “I [went] to Brazil for three years to help build cisterns for catching rain water.”

Ruth Ellen Dandurand ’10’s desire to do long-term missionary work intensified during her experience in the Middle East. “Over the last two years, I have continually asked Him for the opportunity to use me somewhere else in the world. And in January the ball started rolling for a year of missionary service in Guinea-Bissau through Eastern Mennonite Missions that, Lord willing, will start in August, 2012. So far there has been a great deal of peace and answers to prayers as He leads me on this incredible journey that began as a child and took form during my experience in the Middle East.”

“I can trace my time with MCC back to that experience [on cross-cultural],” says Ed Nyce ’86, who worked for the organization in Bethlehem and Amman, Jordan, from 1999 to 2007. Several MCC volunteers in the region when he was a student played a significant role in his trip, he says. Nyce later helped facilitate trips for the EMU cross-culturals that happened while he was with MCC.

“My EMU cross-cultural semester, other EMU courses, additional work and study experiences, and MCC assignments have all combined with other factors to help shape my worldview, and led to the many questions that are always banging around inside of me,” Nyce says. “What does it mean to love neighbor and enemy, or two neighbors, when what is experienced as love by one is not automatically understood as love by the other? How does one succeed in standing with that person or group who is disempowered, perhaps especially when my own country plays a significant role in the conflict as it does there, without standing against the humanity of the one in power, yet also without dropping the ball on the need to address real power issues?”

— By Andrew Jenner ’04. Read about his conflicted reactions to his 2002 Middle East cross-cultural.

The wish came true in the fall of 2002, when Landis and 29 other students left for a semester of study and travel in the Middle East. It was the second time he’d ever been out of North America, the first being a post-high school choir trip to Europe.

That particular cross-cultural occurred during a tense time; the second Palestinian Intifada was continuing its violence, and the United States was preparing to go to war in Iraq. It was an intense, complicated experience, Landis said; the months of travel in a region of intense and clashing cultural, political and religious dynamics provided an educational opportunity unlike any he’d ever had.

“That became a lot more fascinating than some of the learning I was doing in school,” he told Crossroads. “We were not just students, [and] we were not just touring. We were travelers who were learning. It’s a totally different perspective than you see most people traveling with.”

During a week-long period of free travel that fall, Landis and three others from the trip hiked a section of the 600-mile-long Israel National Trail. The brief taste of life on the trail, in a place so full of confusing and enthralling and full of things to see and learn, only whet his appetite for more.

Aware of EMU’s record for producing graduates who succeed at medical school, Landis had intended to end up as a physician when he enrolled in EMU, but the semester-long experience abroad put a wrinkle in his schedule. It meant he was going to need an extra year between college and medical school to finish all his entrance requirements. But rather than taking his MCATs and working on med-school applications after graduation, he found himself planning a year-long, four-continent, round-the-world trip with Eric Kennel ’04, a close friend of Landis who’d been with him on the cross-cultural.

By the time they left, it had become clear to Landis that he wasn’t going to med school after all. He was more interested in the possibilities of travel as a unique way of learning and serving, much like he’d first experienced on his cross-cultural.

“After this trip, I really have no idea where I’ll be,” wrote Landis, on the website he and Kennel created to document their trip. “I’m hoping that this journey will provide insight into the many possibilities … and point me toward a certain direction for the future.”

While planning to hike the entire Israel National Trail during the year of travel, Landis befriended an Israeli hiking enthusiast named Maoz Inon, who later opened a hostel. The relationship turned out to be the future direction Landis was looking for. By 2007, the two began mapping and marking the Jesus Trail, a new 40-mile hiking route through the Galilee. The next year, Anna Dintaman ’05 Landis joined them (she and David married in 2010).

Today, the Landises have published a guidebook to the trail, which hosts thousands of visitors – including the EMU Middle East cross-cultural group – each year who come to retrace some of Jesus’ travels during his ministry.

“It’s amazing to see something [like this] that started with a learning experience at EMU,” said Landis. “Everything is kind of connected back to the cross-cultural, to that one week of hiking on free travel.”

With the Jesus Trail well-established, David and Anna – a member of the 2004 Middle East cross-cultural group – are focusing on other projects through their company, Village to Village press, which they founded to publish the tour guide they wrote for the Jesus Trail. In late 2012, they will release a guidebook to the Camino de Santiago, a route in northern Spain used by pilgrims to visit the traditional burial site of St. James. In the future, the two have several other ideas in the works, all of them promoting thoughtful, open-minded travel as a way of learning and change.

“It’s not just about how to get from point A to point B, it’s about having a meaningful, well-rounded experience along the way,” Landis said.

— Andrew Jenner

Yet a year before all these stories, you could have heard about the Jesus Trail and David Landis right here at EMU where Laura Amstuz, communications officer for the Seminary, posted an online report about it on May 20, 2008.

That spring, Landis was part of a pilot program to offer a “hybrid” EMU course, combining online and in-person education, under the tutelage of Linford L. Stutzman, EMU associate professor of culture and mission. It was called “The Jesus Movement in the Early Context.” Landis and Anna Dintaman ’05 (featured on the ABC news report) were two of the six students in the class. As his class project, Landis chose to develop and promote the Jesus Trail.

More than a year later, on June 7, 2009, the Washington Post featured Landis as the trail’s co-founder, working with an Israeli entrepreneur, Maoz Inon. On the front page of its Travel section under the headline “A Spiritual Journey and Then Some,” Landis is seen in a photo taken by Dintaman. He is overlooking the Sea of Galilee, with a daypack on his shoulder. The Post article jumps inside to almost a full page with more photos taken by both Dintaman and Landis, where the reporter notes, “Landis, a Mennonite …hopes the project will encourage understanding among faiths and cultures.”

Actually, Landis is not simply “a Mennonite.” He works for Franconia Mennonite Conference from his base in Nazareth, Israel, according to an article he wrote on the Jesus Trail in the February 17, 2009, issue of The Mennonite.

His interest in the Middle East was sparked by his EMU cross-cultural to the Middle East during his junior year, he wrote in The Mennonite. “My experiences abroad initiated misgivings about going into medicine after graduation. I began a period of global travel to explore possibilities. In the following year, I visited more than 40 countries.”

Landis concluded, “The choice to follow Jesus is to transform life into a journey, take nothing for the road and walk with a trust in providence.”