The reason I came to that place in my life,
I was very disillusioned I think from growing up in a home that from the outside looked
really, really good - we lived in a nice house in a really nice neighborhood and had everything
we needed materially, and yet behind closed doors it was very, very shallow and vacant,
and left you with a feeling of insecurity. And I was just determined to prove there was
a better way to live. I was raised in New York City into a Jewish
family, we attended synagogue on the high holy days, I had family members that attended
synagogue every friday, every shabbat, and in my home, even though we celebrated the
holidays, it was really more an understanding that the stories behind the holidays were
fairytales. The thing that really did make a difference in my life is my mom taught me
a prayer when I was a toddler: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep,
if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” And when my mom taught
me that prayer as a little girl, I really knew there was a God. And that stayed with
me, and it carried me all through my childhood, my teenage years - I knew that when I prayed
that prayer, that there was a God up there that heard me. My mom and dad loved me very, very much, I
always, always knew that, but I was also raised in a home where there was a lot of tension.
From the time I was a little girl, I lived with the threat of divorce hanging over my
head, sometimes my parents wouldn’t talk to each other for days, and I was the messenger
between them. There were a lot of fractured relationships - my mother and my grandmother
hated each other, my mother and my brother didn’t like each other, and I grew up with
that, just a feeling of insecurity. By the time I got into college, I was a very,
very angry, rebellious, young woman. I dropped LSD, smoked pot, I lied a lot of times to
cover up my wrongdoing to keep from getting caught, and I loved to shock people by the
way that I looked, the way that I dressed I loved the attention. So even at 19 years
old and in college, I was still praying that prayer that my mom taught me as a toddler,
and that led me to really, really search to find out: who is this God? And that took me
down the road of learning about Hinduism, Buddhism, transcendental meditation, I worshipped
a guru in India, I chanted, just searching in all these places. And it was about that
time in my life that I met Michael; also Jewish. And we had a talk one day and talked about
our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our thoughts about God, and we were just amazed at the
end of this three hour conversation that we were so alike, and we both knew after that
one talk that we were soul mates, kindred spirits. Well a month later, Michael came to me, and
he told me that he believed in Jesus, and I was devastated, because I thought, “Oh
my gosh, a Jesus freak? This is no good”. After all, I was raised in a home where Jesus
was never mentioned, in fact, if we said his name it was like saying the worst profanity,
and we’d get our mouth washed out with soap. I was raised in a home where my mom was taught
when she was a child that it was all Jesus’s fault that Jews had been murdered and persecuted
throughout the ages, and that Hitler was a Christian. This was just horrible news for
me, because I knew I couldn’t embrace what he did. I couldn’t deny the change that
I had seen in Michael’s life just in this one short month, but I was not at all interested
in hearing what he had to say about Jesus But then one day he came to me and said, “Deb,
would you mind if I just read something aloud to you from the New Testament?” And I thought,
“OK”. Now you’ve got to understand, here I was, 20 years old, raised in New York
City, and never once had I heard or read anything from the New Testament in my whole life, and
I had no idea that Jesus was Jewish, I had no idea that he claimed to be the Messiah
that my Jewish people were waiting for all of these years… in fact, I thought Jesus
was Catholic. I grew up near a Catholic church, and there he was on the cross, and I thought
he was Catholic. But I said, “Sure, you can read to me aloud”. So, he opened up to
John chapter 8, the story of the Pharisees bringing the adulterous woman to Jesus. “And the
scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in
his midst, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the
very act. Now the law of Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say?””
And as he’s reading this to me, I was sitting on the edge of my seat. I had no idea how
this story was going to end. “And they were saying this, testing him, in order that they
might have grounds for accusing him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger, wrote on
on the ground, but when they persisted in asking him, he straightened up and said to them,
“He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” When
Michael read that line to me, that Jesus spoke, something in me opened up, and I just started
to weep. Now I had read about Buddha and Krishna and all these other gods out there, but when
he spoke these words of Jesus, I knew it was a miracle, it was like God opened my eyes
and I saw that this Jesus was different than all the other gods that I had learned about. That
this had to be the very very words of God, in that one verse, all the love, and the compassion
and the mercy of God was encapsulated in that and I just started to cry. So though my eyes were open, I immediately
was filled with tremendous conflict: how could I, as a Jew, embrace this Jesus? And I remember
just closing my eyes and praying and saying, “God, if Jesus really is the Messiah, you
are really going to have to prove it to me”, because I knew the stakes for me were going
to be very, very high. Though I’d been angry and rebellious, there was still a part of
me I did not want to devastate my parents and my whole family. And I knew that God really,
really had to prove it to me that I was going down the right path. So the very next day I was invited to this
meeting, and sitting in front of me was a little boy, about five years old, with his
mom. And the man leading the meeting asked if anyone needed prayer, and the mom raised
her hand, and she said her little boy was deaf in his right ear. So the man came up
to this little boy and laid his hand on his ear, and just simply prayed for healing in
the name of Jesus, for this little boy to get his hearing, and right there in front
of my very eyes I saw this little boy get his hearing. And when I saw that, and that
it was done in the name of Jesus that's all I needed. Well a week later, I got up the courage to
call my mom to tell her the news that I believed in Jesus, and it was a difficult conversation.
My mom was devastated, she was furious, and really, really disappointed in me, and very
very much hated Michael because she knew that even though he was Jewish, he was the one
that was responsible for introducing me to Jesus. So it was a very very difficult conversation,
and she wound up making an appointment with the rabbi for Michael and I to go see him
in the hopes that the rabbi would be able to persuade us to not believe in Jesus anymore.
And the result of that meeting with the rabbi, he said to my mom afterwards that he believed that we
were on the verge of having nervous breakdowns, that we were in a cult, and that we were potential
Nazis. Which just added to my mom’s devastation, because if a rabbi said it, it had to be true.
It was really very, very devastating for her. Well, three months later, Michael and I were
married, and sadly our parents would not attend our wedding because we had a pastor marry
us. But shortly after we got married, we were living on the other side of the country, and shortly
after we got married I called my mom and I wanted to encourage her because I was so
happy and I called to tell her how wonderful Michael was, how he was loving me, he was
treating me like a princess, and hoped that it would make her feel better. And instead
she said something like, “Why don’t you just divorce him and come back home and live
with me?” And when she said that to me I was so angry at her, I just slammed the phone down,
and I went to Michael and I was so angry, I was shaking and I said, “Do you know what
my mom just said to me? She hates you, she hates our marriage, I don’t want her in
our lives, she’s not good for us, I don’t want anything to do with her anymore -
She hates you, and she hates our marriage.” He listened to me and he said, “Deb, you call your
mom back and you apologize for hanging up. We are going to love your mom - we are
going to love her. Now you call her and apologize.” Well God had a big clean up job to do with
us - being two drug-using hippies and he taught us how to be responsible, which was no easy
task for two very irresponsible hippies, and over the years we had two children and raised
them to know the Lord. We started a business and have lived a very very… have had a very
happy home and a good family, everything I always wanted as a little girl in my home,
God has blessed me with in my own family. Our children are now married and serving God,
and we have grandchildren who we adore. And the best part about this thing, this story, is
that my mom who at one time years ago hated Michael, now Michael is probably, next to
my son, is her most favorite man walking on the face of the earth, and I know that it’s
the result of the years of just loving her, very very much, and God has blessed that.
