Don’t have a lot of time right now, but if you follow my personal Facebook page, then you have probably seen where I am on my way to Israel.

In a nutshell, this is my second trip to the Holy Land to shoot stills and video for TLC Holyland Tours and True Life Concepts Ministries and Dr. Tony Crisp. The former pastor at our church, Chilhowee Hills Baptist in Knoxville, Dr. Crisp leads tours and teaches on and about the land of the Lord. I’ll be there for over a week, returning on Jan. 21

My first trip was in September of 2009 and it was a life-altering experience. If you are a Christian, then I do not believe that scripture can really come alive for you in the way that it does when you see for yourself where our Lord lived and died.

This current trip came about very quickly. An opening developed about two weeks ago and what had been talked about happening possibly in the spring or even next year got moved up. I spent a lot of last week acquiring new equipment and trying to get things ready with the business to go. It was pretty much a blur of activity.

And then came the weather. As we got closer to departure, the winter storm that hit Knoxville on Sunday night loomed larger and larger. Due to that and flight schedules, Dr. Crisp decided to move our departure up a day from Monday to Sunday. A good thing because as the picture below shows, even the Nashville airport, which wasn’t hit nearly as hard as Atlanta, had its share of icing to deal with (and no that is not our plane, by the way).

So Sunday night we hit the road to Nashville, and departed for Newark yesterday morning. It actually worked out great because we got into Newark early enough for me to go over to Manhattan for a while in the afternoon (I’ll try to do a blog post about that adventure when I get back). We leave the hotel here in about an hour to head to the airport and depart for Tel Aviv at 3:30 this afternoon. It’s an 11 hour flight and as soon as we arrive (at about 9:30 am or so Israel time), we immediately begin touring.

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, but I think I’m ready. I will try to do at least a short blog post every day to let you see where and what we are doing.

So stay tuned. It should be an incredible journey.