Pools of Bethesda

This past free day I spent half the day in the center working on a paper and the other half out in the city.  I have come to realize that my time is slowly dwindling here and that scares me a little!  I have so much I still want to do.  Luckily I was able to go to a place that I had wanted to go to for a while now.  A group of us went over to the Pools of Bethesda and St. Anne’s Church.  This is the place in John 5 that Christ heals the lame man who had been waiting for years for an angel to trouble the water so that he could be healed.  This is one of my favorite New Testament stories.  I remember learning about this story from Brother Wilson last semester and loving the painting by Carl Bloch that hangs in the MOA on BYU campus.  It is just a beautiful story. 

St. Anne’s Church is a place that commemorates the birth of Mary.  The chapel was really beautiful.  There was a statue with the mother of Mary and Mary on her lap with a table of candles around it.  I decided that I would contribute to that table of candles and light my own.  So I was trying to light this small tea light and it took me a while but it finally lit, but the flame grew really really quickly.  I was in the process of putting it down on the table when the flame got big enough that it started to burn me.  I was trying my best not to drop this little candle on this wooden table.  In my head I could just picture the whole chapel going up in flames all because I wanted to contribute to the candle collection.  But I safely got the candle on the table and my finger is still intact, so don’t worry about me too much, the burn wasn’t that bad at all. In fact I think it may have just been the heat from the flame, but a burn sounds much more cooler.  

The candle closest to the bottom of this picture is the one that burnt me.  I thought I would be sentimental and get a picture of it.