Isen's Excitement

In the past week Isen has realized that our family is somehow connected to Ethiopia. He had kept forgetting that his new baby brother or sister would be joining our family from Ethiopia but now he finally understands exactly why Ethiopia is important to us. It is so exciting that he has come to this conclusion all on his own! Enoch and Keenen still don't understand, but they are too young to really understand much. I am surprised that Isen has, seeing as he is only five.

Tomorrow we will be giving a presentation at our church regarding our adoption. It is amazing how God has blessed us with such wonderful family and friends! We will be having an Ethiopian dinner...just a sampler of some foods. I will be showing pictures of Ethiopia and talking about the culture, the people and our adoption. It is exciting to be doing something again for our adoption.

Ethiopian Monolithic Churches

I was thinking this morning that Maggie and I have embarked ourselves upon a journey. The path upon which we're traveling is oriented toward the eventual adoption of our youngest child from Ethiopia. As a result, I thought a post about some of the sights in Ethiopia might be appropriate to describe. In this post, I'll highlight one of the (little known) wonders of the world.

I'd like to introduce you to Lalibela, a holy city of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and a pilgrimage site for centuries. It lies in the north of Ethiopia and the eleven churches there are regarded as one of the wonders of the world. They are all excavated -literally carved- right out of the bedrock. Carved into the solid rock, they are an immense maze of underground tunnels and passageways.

Ethiopian tradition says that they were carved in one night by angels. The legend goes that King Lalibela (the Ethiopian monarch in the late 12th to early 13th centuries A.D.) was carried off one night to the heavenly Jerusalem. There he was instructed to build the churches and that angels worked beside each men as they cut each one from the rock.

Some scholars, noting that the style of the Lalibela churches closely matches the architecture of ancient Aksum (the capital during Ethiopia's "golden years" of the 1st to 10th centuries) believe the churches are actually older than that- that some may in fact be converted palaces.
In any case, after King Lalibela's death, the city began to draw thousands of pilgrims coming to see the "new Jerusalem." The people of Ethiopia have a saying about Lalibela that goes like this: "If you do not wish to see Lalibela, you are like someone who has no desire to see the face of Christ."