My Present…
This is the beginning of my journey after the death of my last surviving parent, my mother. She died a few days before Christmas in 2023. My sister, Marilyn and I started talking daily as we grieved. Marilyn sent my daughter and I a book she had read 25 years ago. She was also purchasing the book to use on an on-line Book Club with ladies from the congregation where she worships. Talking daily with my sister about shared events, yet from another person’s perspective was eye opening. I also started reading Theodore E. Dobson’s Book, How To Pray For Spiritual Growth, A Practical Handbook Of Inner Healing. Marilyn allowed my daughter and I to participate in their Book Club.
Talking to my sister daily and closing our conversations in prayer, made a big difference in my life. I started to feel happy again when I started on this journey of Inner Healing and Spiritual Growth. I enthusiastically wanted to pick up some Christian Disciplines that I had dropped due to my increasingly jaded perspective. I am finally beginning to see things again through God’s perspective but in new ways. Dobson’s book presented the subject of forgiveness in a way I had not experienced before. Forgiveness was presented as something you must do for yourself, and then for others in the presence of Jesus. For the first time in my life, I was able to forgive myself and others. When I was a new Christian in the late 1980s, the Christian Discipline of Journaling was a blessing for me. Now God is leading me to do an electronic version, and this is it!
My Past as a Skeptic…
I was raised by Christians, but I held a few things against God and Christians that made me not want to be a Christian. I was skeptical, because I believed Christians were supposed to be perfect. I thought a lot of Christians were faking it or were just not worthy to be perfect. They were not as Christlike as my grandfather, a retired Pastor. He would go to a large bolder on his farm to spend time alone with God. I thought they did not go someplace to be alone with God, because they were unworthy or not real Christians. I also thought God had abandoned the Jewish people to start another religion called Christianity. I thought if God could abandon the Jews, then He might do the same thing to the Christian people. As a young child I noticed most people didn’t say what they meant and also didn’t appear to mean what they say. I tried as a teenager to be perfect for a whole week and found it impossible to be good enough to please myself, my Christian Family or God.
I got married. It was not a happy marriage. We both were not Christians. Before getting divorced, I decided to read the whole Bible and see if God was nice enough to help me. I wanted to know the truth for myself, not just what people had told me about God. After reading the whole Bible, I still felt like I did not really know the truth about God. I prayed to know the whole truth and to see God’s face. I call that prayer my “Truth Prayer”. I suddenly felt God was going to answer my prayer and I got scared and told him to wait. The reason I got scared, I was afraid I would die based on what God told Moses in Exodus 33: 17-23. Yet, I could not shake the need to see God’s face, even though I thought I would die. I also felt desperate to know the truth, the whole truth. I went back to avoiding God.
My husband and I went to counseling and then divorced. I married my 2nd husband that same year. He was a good man and the opposite personality of my ex-husband. It was a marriage of convenience for both of us. He was having financial problems and told me that he was looking for a working wife. He did not want to have children and thought the perfect woman would have one child and no desire to have more children. I was looking for protection from my ex-husband. We were not in love, but I hoped we would come to love each other. We were married by the Justice of the Peace, because I was angry with God. I had a lot of prejudice thoughts and misconceptions about God, but I was too afraid to discuss my thoughts with anyone. Unfortunately, neither my husband nor I ever began to love each other. Our marital problems were Spiritually based and compounded by a lack of mutual love. We went to Counseling and were divorced just before our 8th year Anniversary.
I had gotten involved in New Age inner healing during my second marriage, thinking I could avoid any kind of spiritual stuff. I was wrong. God had given me Psalm 23 as a child; My Lord and Shepherd delivered me. After getting out of trouble with the New Age stuff, I started seeking God’s help again. I did not want to go to church or discuss things with my family. I did a few adjustments and did a repeat of my simple “Truth Prayer” that I had prayed about seven years earlier before getting my first divorce. Then shortly after I started praying for truth again, I got the truth.
Transformed by the love of Christ
My Conversion From Skeptic to Christian…
I went to the 1987 Messianic Convention in Atlanta after a coworker Elizabeth, told me there was a Convention in Atlanta where there were Jews that believed that Jesus was the Messiah and worshiped Him. I was shocked, she was excited. I decided to go that night to see for myself. I didn’t believe it was possible. What changed my mind was seeing for myself I was wrong about Jews being abandoned by God. By listening to how they explained Christianity and Messianic Jews were joint heirs with Jesus (English name) and Yeshua (Hebrew name) due to salvation through the Messiah of GOD, which is Jesus/Yeshua, I began to understand the truth. I also saw with my own eyes the beauty of people happily worshiping God like it was a celebration regardless of how rich or poor someone was. I was in awe. Their happiness inspired me to pray honestly from my seat about how wrong I was and what I thought and believed. I ask Jesus if He would save even me. Jesus said yes and I became one of God’s beloved children. I was spying on them, so I didn’t go up front during the alter call, but fortunately, Jesus was still willing to save me where I was.
The Convention was an UMJC event. One of their hosts was a local Congregation, Beth Hallel from Roswell, Georgia. I began to visit the local Messianic Synagogue, Beth Hallel. I visited their Synagogue a number of times like a tourist bringing family and friends. I felt like I had traveled to the Holy Land to see Jesus’ environment as a boy growing up in Israel. However, I saved thousands of dollars! At Beth Hallel, I could see people that were Jewish by birth worshipping the Messiah, Jesus, Yeshua in their native language and the same language Jesus had spoken in His Synagogue in Israel. Better yet, they also translated everything into English too.
This Congregation reminds me that the first church that worshipped Jesus, Yeshua, were all Jews. Then, in Acts 10, Peter was told by God that the Gentiles could be allowed into the Synagogue too. I saw this as the way the Early Church eventually had Gentile and Jewish believers worshipping the Messiah together. I had never realized until after I became a believer that Jesus is the English translation of Yeshua. I had always imagined Him being called by His English name by family and friends. It’s kind of mind blowing to realize that Jesus and His disciples would have been called by their Hebrew names. Thanks to YouTube I can now even visit this very same Messianic Synagogue, Beth Hallel in Roswell, Georgia from the comfort of my home. I had always thought for years that the convention in 1987 had been a Jews For Jesus event, but I was wrong. I did purchase music and a few things through Jews For Jesus after the conference. For those interested in checking out Jesus’ Jewish roots, the Congregation of Beth Hallel is still around, and you can find it on YouTube or its website at www.bethhallel.org. I hope and pray that God blesses you beyond words if you are led to check it out!
Following Christ
The Lord led me to join Beth Hallel as a Remote Member of this Messianic Synagogue on September 13-14, 2024. I am seeing the Book of Acts in the Bible with new eyes from the perspective of a Christian Gentile who loves Jesus while worshiping alongside the early Messianic Believers who also love Him as Yeshua. It is humbling as I realize that I was brought to the Lord in faith by Jewish believers, by Disciples of the Messiah just as the early Gentile Christian believers had been. Even though I am 70 years old as I join this Congregation of believers, I am humbled that God does not consider me too old to learn something new about Him.