I was pretty empty
I didn't have much to give.
I needed answers.
I needed to be loved for who I was.
I started reading about Judaism,
God, what I must do to please him...
It was really quite frustrating.
What I was reading really didn't show me
a picture of a very loving God,
but rather a picture of a God who
demanded things of me.
Why would I want to enter into
a relationship with a God that
I could never really please?
I was different from my Gentile friends.
I proudly wore my Jewish star
I was happy to tell my Catholic friends
that I couldn't go to church with them,
but in terms of really understanding
what it meant to be Jewish,
I really couldn't tell you except that
I wasn't supposed to believe in Jesus.
At 13 years old
I went to see Led Zeppelin.
I just knew that I wanted
to somehow be in rock music.
I was 18, so I packed my bags
and flew to London, England
thinking that I could
get into a band pretty easily.
Well, I got there and
life was not very easy.
Bands were a dime a dozen.
My boyfriend started becoming
abusive, emotionally.
I was lonely, I was hurting
I wasn't making friends
as easily as I had hoped I would
and I found myself
pretty dependent upon him.
I was desperately in need
of some answers.
I thought that I would find the answers
to the meaning of my life,
the meaning of love
in my religion
so I went to the library
and I checked out a few of the books
that were available on Judaism.
I started reading about God
and I read a lot about
what I must do to please him.
It was really quite frustrating
and disturbing to me
that what I was reading
really didn't show me a picture
of a very loving God,
but rather a picture of a God who
demanded things of me.
I was pretty empty.
I didn't have much to give.
I needed answers.
I needed to be loved for who I was.
I ended up just putting those books down
and just really kind of going into
a sort of depression and
my relationship with this guy
only got worse.
The abuse really just intensified.
At that same time,
my brother and my best friend
started sharing with me that if I
wanted to know the way of happiness,
if I wanted to know the truth,
if I wanted joy in my life and peace,
then I needed to turn to Jesus.
Even though I wasn't a religious Jew
there was no way that I wanted
to turn to this Jesus.
I was a Jew and
Jesus was not for the Jewish people.
Things took a bad turn.
My boyfriend left me
and the band fired me.
You know, the two most important
things in my life were gone.
One night after I had partied a lot
I came home to my
quiet, dark apartment.
I realized that I was at the lowest point
I had ever felt in my life.
I had a choice:
I could cry myself to sleep
or I could pick up that Bible
that my brother had given me
a few years earlier
and start reading it.
I went over to the drawer
where I had stored this Bible.
I opened that drawer,
I pulled it out,
and I started reading
Matthew chapter 1:
The genealogy of Jesus.
And I saw that
Jesus was Jew!
Jesus was related to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
King David,
and the list went on.
I was completely blown away.
I just kept reading the pages
and I kept thinking,
okay, if Jesus is Jewish
then I should be able to trust
what these pages are saying.
I saw that
he
loved me and
that he was for me...
The Spirit of God came into my room
and His presence was so thick
that I felt like if I just close my eyes
and open them
I would see God.
I started to weep...
A peace came upon me
a peace that I had never
experienced before.
I cried all night,
but they weren't tears of despair
they were tears of joy
that God had come and visited me
that night and made it clear to me
that Jesus was my Messiah,
that I could trust him.
The New Testament
it's a book of great love,
it's a story of a man named Jesus
who gave his life for mine
and I found that after
I learned that about him
that I wanted nothing more
than to give my life to him.