Our Discovery Trip
We were frustrated because our move to Jordan was not progressing. When we first heard from the Lord in the month of June that He wanted us to move to Jordan, we assumed we would be gone within six months. That didn’t happen for a lot of reasons. Al was crippled because of his arthritic hip, and I had an asthmatic bronchial disorder that almost killed me. There were many other details as well, but after we regained our health, it boiled down to money.
It takes a lot of cash just to move to another city or state, let alone around the world. There were several repairs that our house needed before we could put it on the market, and then there was the question of how to separate the household goods we wanted to take with us from the things we wanted to sell. The logistics just wouldn’t work.
We knew that, unlike others who had moved to Aqaba, Jordan, we could not simply dispatch our worldly goods in a metal shipping container and fly over without having seen the city where we were moving. We needed to “get the lay of the land” so to speak, take a discovery trip. We had to see what goods were available to purchase there and what was not so we could decide whether to buy there or ship it from the US. Having no idea what apartments looked like or rented for, we felt we had to look at what was available. Climate, culture, and safety were also a concern.
We needed to have a plan in advance. But that meant spending several thousand dollars for plane tickets and living expenses while we were there. Our friend Carl told us we needed a minimum of three weeks for our discovery trip. It helped that he and his wife insisted we stay with them.
So, we waited on the Lord.
Because I want to keep this short, I am not going to go into great detail. Suffice it to say, the Lord worked several miracles and provided the money we needed to make the trip.
The summers are miserable where temperatures are in the low 100s but can reach 120°
We flew to Jordan and stayed from mid-November until the second week in December. Everything was so different from our life in the US. While the temperature in Oklahoma was heading toward the 40s, it was around 82° in the daytime in Aqaba and in the upper 60s at night. We slept with the windows open in December. It even rained a couple times while we were there. Jordan is the fourth most water-depleted country in the world. It gets two to four inches of rain annually in Aqaba, ten to eighteen inches in the northwestern area of Jordan. Of course, the summers are miserable where temperatures are in the low 100s but can reach 120°. It’s a far cry from our home in lush Oklahoma where our annual rainfall averages 42 inches.
We had been told that Aqaba was like 1950s America. We found that to be a fair assessment. There are no large shopping malls as we see in the United States, but we did visit a good-sized grocery store which had a basement level floor I would compare to a mini-Walmart. We looked at appliances, home décor items, health and beauty products, televisions, and a variety of other goods there that let us know we wouldn’t have to bring everything with us.
The next four blogs will analyze the main Scriptures that inform us that Jordan will be a place of safety in the end times. After that, we invite you to join us for the next several months as we unpack what we learned about this hot, dusty, desert country and azure waters of the Gulf of Aqaba.
Anita