I first visited Israel in 1992 through an Archaeology Dig with Wake Forest University. We excavated the Temple Platform and early Christian Church at Caesarea that summer. I was never the same. While attending professors droned on about iron-age 'this' and Byzantinian Architecture 'that', the Holy Spirit was screaming inside me - "but this is where Jesus walked!"

I went back to Israel 10 times over the last three decades and every trip - I found something new. Sometimes my eyes were opened to new truths as the Scriptures came to life and I retraced the steps of the Apostles, the sinners, and Jesus Himself.

On one trip, I found myself in a hostel on a cliff overlooking the Sea of Galilee with a head full of doubt and a hardened heart that screamed, "how could Mark 4:35-41 have really happened on such a small peaceful little lake?" and how my heart melted and tears flowed as the wind began to blow and a storm came up from nowhere and white caps filled that Sea below!

Without a doubt, every trip was a chance to make new friends, some Jewish, some Arab, some Christian. Many were business leaders. There were teachers, soldiers, tour guides, and even missionaries. All were Israeli, and all a part of God's tapestry of purpose and prophecy in the modern State of Israel.

Of course, I had to eat on these trips. I did not feel called to relive the 40 days of fasting in the desert! This lead to new discoveries: the humus, fresh baked pita bread, hundreds of varieties of olives, fresh fruits and vegetables grown in a previously desolate patch of sand, and that's all before we got into the Halva, Chocolate, date bars, cookies, and candies that were handed down from millenias of Jewish mother's - the scale was always different when I returned home!

That's when Chocolate Israel was born...

Form the Date Honey that bees' ancestors pollenated two thousand years ago along the Jordan River where John the Baptist baptized Jesus; to the Granola grown in flourishing fields on the Golan Heights; to Fig Preserves made from the fruit of the Galilee by a colony of German Christians who emigrated to Israel in the 1950s; to Chocolate Bars that put Dubai to shame and are made in Nazareth - wait, "can anything good come from Nazareth?"

This is it! This is what I can bring back from Israel and share with fellow Believers who want to Taste and See that the Lord is Good and that the Land is Good and support God's Chosen People maybe one last time.

This is Chocolate Israel.