For most students of the Bible, a visit to Israel qualifies as a "trip of a lifetime." I was fortunate enough to make the journey this past March, and it was every bit as great as I had hoped. Since I returned home, I've been sharing my experiences and my photographs with friends and relatives, and now with you.

I met my fellow travelers, all members of the church of Christ and most of them from Texas, in the air terminal at Newark, New Jersey, which is a hub for overseas air travel. Our group numbered only 14, including the two group leaders, so we soon became one large family.

We had been warned that the Israeli airline, El Al, was very uptight about flight security, and that we would be questioned exhaustively before being allowed to board the plane. We also were required to examine any luggage that had been out of our possession for even a minute, to be sure no one had stuck anything in it.

We flew non-stop from Newark to Tel Aviv, Israel, using the polar route past Newfoundland and the North Atlantic, and then south past Ireland, across France and over the Mediterranean Sea to Tel Aviv. We flew in a newer-model 747 which had several nice features, such as individual television screens on the seat-backs in front of us, and a choice of several movies.

But the flight lasted nine hours, and, long before we arrived, I had come to feel like I was literally "shoe-horned" into my seat. I finally found a place near an emergency exit where I could stand for an hour or two, to relieve my aching bones. We had departed from Newark at 5 p.m. EST, and arrived in Tel Aviv at 9 a.m. Israeli time. Although most of us had slept very little, our sight-seeing began immediately.

We began our tour in the northern part of the country, in the area of Nazareth, spending almost a week in the rural areas where Jesus also spent most of his life. The second week was spent in Jerusalem with a couple of trips into the countryside to the southeast and southwest of Jerusalem.

Even though Israel is a very small country, only 150 miles long and about 30 miles wide, it contains so many notable places that a person could spend months traveling and absorbing the history of the place. The Bible covers more than 4,000 years of the area's history, and another 1,900 years of human life have taken place there since the last of the Bible was written.

We bypassed several cities where the Israeli government had recently allowed the Arab majorities to assume management of the city government. Of these Arab-controlled cities, we were most sorry to miss going to Nazareth and Hebron. We did go to Bethlehem, because the Arabs there consider tourists a welcome source of income for city residents.

Despite a history of recurring clashes between Jews and Moslems in Israel, I felt perfectly secure while in the country. It seemed strange, but not threatening, to see young soldiers everywhere, each with his rifle slung on his back in such a familiar way. We were told that the soldiers, both male and female, must keep their guns on their persons the entire time of their two or three year compulsory military service.

The evidence of past unrest was especially visible in the Golan Heights area, where barbed-wire fortifications lined the roads, and concrete watchtowers were scattered through the hills. When our bus traveled up onto the Heights. We could well understand the importance of the area. The rolling, wooded hills could have hidden platoons of soldiers, who would have been invisible to anyone on the plains below. But the few farmers working the fields on the West Bank stood out like targets, as we looked their way from the Heights.