- On the outside I looked pretty good.
I was slim.
I was fit, like, in shape.
But inside I was actually a big mess.
I had no idea how to cope,
how to just live life
and function in basic ways
that as a young adult you need to learn.
When I was a child,
we went to synagogue.
We celebrated the holidays.
And there was a sense
of connection to the past
like the history of our people.
It was something almost
for children that you heard the stories.
There wasn't really much
thought or expression given to
that this was truth.
I had an experience
when I was in high school
that was very traumatic.
I was sexually assaulted
by some boys that I thought were my friends.
And it made me so fearful,
fearful of men, fearful of life.
It was just so traumatic.
Being assaulted sexually
made me feel very bad about myself.
I felt disgusting about myself.
And it was so painful.
I think I was enraged and hateful,
and I didn't know how to process those feelings.
I had a hunger for something inside of me that was intense,
and I was somebody who was very about my heart.
Like the drug I really got addicted to was sugar,
and I didn't stop
until I was in physical pain
from a bellyache,
and I just couldn't keep eating anymore.
And so the eating was a way
and the bulimia was a way
of numbing myself from the emotions.
I was searching.
I got involved in yoga.
Very intensely into yoga.
Like I even lived in a yoga center fro about a year
and we would get up six in the morning.
I was kinda trying to piece these ideas together
that make sense spiritually.
And one day I heard a woman
talking about having a relationship with God
where she knew that He loved her.
It was like a key where everything
fit together around the key.
That was what I was looking for.
Instead of trying to piece together all these ideas
and make something out of it,
I wanted that connection,
that peace that she had.
Finally I went to her apartment
and we're talking and she says that really
what she had that I wanted was Yeshua.
I never thought about Jesus before.
And she's telling me that
he could make this difference in my life
and she said that
the definition of a Christian
was a person who was following Christ.
If by that definition,
you could be Catholic and not be a Christian,
or you could be Jewish and be a Christian.
I went from the heart.
I prayed with this woman that night.
I was like okay I'll try.
So I prayed with her.
I opened my heart,
ask God to forgive me
of things I had done,
and I asked Yeshua to be with me.
When I left her apartment that night,
I remember walking to the bus.
This Yeshua was with me
in a way that was really different.
It wasn't like all these other things I was doing.
And I began reading the Bible little by little.
I noticed it wasn't so much while I was reading,
but in between readings,
things that I had read
would all of a sudden
come to mind in between
and relate totally to something
that was going on in my life.
It was just amazing.
The Hebrew Scriptures
from the beginning all the way through
prophesied of the Messiah,
and Jesus fulfills prophecies.
This book has life in it
and it like somehow it's hard to explain,
but it somehow like feeds me
on the inside and fills me up,
and I got answers to my prayers.
It was more of an interaction.
Praying wasn't just something I did.
It was something that was, like I say,
a relationship, an interaction,
like I would say something or ask God something,
maybe in the next day or over a period of time,
I see different ways
that God is showing me in my life
answers to my questions.
Jesus talked about
the internal issues of the law,
not just how you looked on the outside.
You might be following all the rules
but hating your brother in your heart, okay,
so the hating, the part that's going on in your own heart,
that's how Jesus interpret it.
When God says not to murder,
he doesn't want even our heart
to be in that frame of mind.