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.