Candace Cameron Bure And Tara-Leigh Cobble Talk Faith and The Holy Spirit
By Movieguide® Contributor
In a recent episode of her podcast, Candace Cameron Bure sat down with Tara-Leigh Cobble for a fascinating dialogue on their shared interest in the story of Scripture.
After introducing her guest over coffee and matcha, Bure asked Cobble about her travels to the Holy Land and some of her favorite moments there.
Cobble talked about a site that had special importance for her:
One of my favorite sites there…[having been] to Israel, I think, 18 times…there’s a site that the first few times that I went there, one of the amazing things about Israel is that there are sites being discovered all the time. And so when I first went to Israel in 2012, the site that I’m about to tell you about did not yet exist. It hadn’t opened because…it hadn’t been excavated yet. So it’s a place called Magdala and it is on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, and you may recognize the word Magdala if you’re a Bible reader because Mary Magdalene was from Magdala, and it was this town on the shore near where Jesus lived. He lived in a town called Capernaum and this is just south of there.
So in Magdala what’s so cool about it is, first of all, I love that archaeology continues to prove the Bible true. Because for a long time people would read scripture and it says, Jesus taught in all the synagogues around the Galilee. And all these people who are scientists and people who are digging in the earth…are saying, “There are no synagogues in the Galilee. So…scripture’s lying because there aren’t any synagogues for him to teach in. They have since discovered seven synagogues from the first century in that region. And it just keeps proving scripture true. So what’s cool about this one in particular is they were trying to build a hotel for all the tourists. And the first dig that the excavator machine did…it hit a stone that is called the Magdala stone. That’s what they’ve named it now, it’s in a museum. The Magdala stone was the centerpiece of ancient synagogues. It’s where they would roll out the scrolls. It’s kind of like a modern day pulpit. And they recognized it has all this beautiful artwork on the side, and they’re like, this is what they use in synagogues, so they have to stop building the hotel….But they discover this, it’s a mosaic tile floor fully intact. And the stone where they roll out the scrolls, so Jesus would have unrolled a scroll on that stone to teach in that synagogue.
Now, as I said, that stone is in a museum. But what isn’t in a museum? That’s my favorite artifact in Israel. And when you go you can touch it….There’s a bowl that’s a wash basin that would be outside the entrance to synagogues. And law abiding Jews would wash their hands in that, to purify their hands before they go into the synagogue. That means, Jesus, being the law abiding Jew that he was, would have washed his hands in that wash basin….And the fact that, the hands that built the earth, that built that rock itself, washed in them, were pierced for my sins…every time I see that stone I want to just hug it and crawl inside it….It’s not a holy item….But it’s beautiful to me. And it reminds me of his humanity.
Bure and Cobble went on to discuss their separate travel experiences to places where, as Cobble says, “your faith has come alive”, how interactions with other believers all over the world has enriched their faith and built up the body of Christ, and what it’s like to be a Christian on the public stage as a celebrity.
For more uplifting and insightful conversations like these, go to The Candace Cameron Bure Podcast, and to learn more about Tara-Leigh Cobble, check out her mission here.