Goldie
I was a nice Jewish kid from the Bronx, one of two daughters of immigrant parents who were survivors of Nazi death camps.
We were raised with a lot of Jewish culture and spoke Yiddish at home. During my teens, after school or on weekends, I went to a Workmen's Circle School (a school where Jewish culture was taught). Yet despite all my Jewishness, what little sense of God I had disappeared while I was still in junior high school.
Neither was I interested in hearing about Jesus. To top it all off, I was quite hostile toward "Christians," a term I considered synonymous with Gentiles, and to some extent the Nazis. Without Margaret, I probably would have continued to accept that idea as fact.
Margaret was a quiet, gentle country mother and wife, not quite old enough to be my mother but somehow very mature, established, and peaceful. I was a fast-talking, fast-thinking, city kid.
We were so different that it is amazing we became such dear and abiding friends. Yet from the first time I met her, I perceived in her two qualities that no one else I had ever known possessed: a very special calm and an extraordinary sense of love.
I met Margaret in 1971, the summer after I was graduated from Harpur College. I had planned to help a girlfriend move to Albuquerque where she had a new job, but the night before we left, her new job was canceled. Since we had already rented a car and packed our bags, we decided to take a short vacation in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Through a series of word-of-mouth referrals, we ended up staying at a tourist house run by Margaret's family.
For those first few days I stayed at Margaret's home, my conversations with her reflected the friendly differences I sensed. Seeing the "Chai" necklace I wore, she remarked on my being Jewish.
"If I weren't born a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, I would have liked to be a Jew," she said. "The Jews are God's chosen people."
"Chosen for what?" I responded. "Slaughter?"
Another time she asked what I would do when I got to the end of my rope and couldn't depend on myself.
"I'd probably invent God, just like everyone else does," I told her, completely confident that I would never come to such an end. "Then, when the crisis was over, I'd come to my senses and realize I had made the same mistakes everyone else who believes in God makes."
Yet despite all differences, our friendship grew. Underneath my glib and frequent barbs to Margaret about her faith, I was quite aware of some things that I found very difficult to express. One was a genuine envy of the surety Margaret had in her faith. The second was a deep desire that this dear friend be completely justified in her trust of a loving God who cared for the fate of individuals.
When I completed law school, I went to spend a few days with Margaret's family. On Sunday evening we went to a slide show on Israel.
The accompanying narrative traced the biblical record alongside Israel's history. That night, for the first time, I faced a crisis of faith.
I had looked at God as man's invention and the Bible as folklore. Yet someone had taken the Bible and compared it with history. Confronted with the facts, I knew that I would finally have to admit that perhaps, even probably, God was real. Given the amount of energy I had spent denying God, this was a crushing blow.
Four years of my words and wise-cracks suddenly dried up. As Margaret and I sat to the wee hours of the morning, we barely spoke. Instead I sat silently and pondered much of what I'd heard for the past years about a loving God who cares, a personal God, the God of Israel who was and is and always will be. He is a God of fact as well as of faith; He is a God who is real not only for gentle, soft Margaret, but also for a fast-thinking, overachieving Jewish lawyer from New York.
Margaret gave me a choice, perhaps the only one I was capable of making just then. "Are you willing to give God a chance to show you?"
For several hours I was unable to answer that question. I knew what it meant, what I would be acknowledging; I was afraid God would show me that Jesus was real. I sat quiet at times, crying at times, tormented by my need to avoid causing my parents any pain.
I had placed logic on a pedestal, and now I realized that logic had taken me as far as it could. The only "logical" conclusion was to take a leap of faith.
I saw in one flash that the Bible was valid. It had something to say to me.
Finally I was able to break through and I answered, "Yes."
It took me almost a week before I understood what I had done. I started to read the Bible and talk to Margaret every day. Within a couple of days, everything fell into place.
Once I realized the Bible was true and that God wanted something from me, I felt like I had no choice except to obey Him by accepting Jesus as my Messiah. Later that summer I met some Jewish believers and learned more about what it means to be a Jew who believes in Messiah.
I waited until the fall before I told my parents about my faith. To this day, they consider my belief a betrayal to them and to Judaism.
Looking back on the time I spent with Margaret, I see how each of my well-reasoned thoughts and arguments were so much a part of me that I couldn't have given in to God during a moment of weakness. If I had, I would have always been haunted with the idea that I had created Him.
Instead, through the love of a friend and the patience of the Lord, He showed me the truth of Proverbs 9:10: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding."
