How did I get here?

Yes, I have the Talking Heads song in my head - and now you do too. You’re welcome!

I was recently asked if I have shared my story anywhere about how I became a Messianic/Torah Observant/Hebrew thinking person. I realized that even though I’ve shared it many times, I haven’t put it out there in a comprehensive story. I think it’s time I did!

To start with, as I shared in the Ask a Messianic Rabbi discussion on Rachel Held Evans’ site (http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/ask-a-messianic-jew-response), I was not raised Jewish.

My grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister, but my mother studied and changed her beliefs about many things she had been taught as a child. My father had been raised without religion at all. When my mother shared the basics of what she believed, he thought it made sense and joined her in faith.

Questions Are Okay

In our home, the Bible had the final say on what we believed. We also knew that everything could be questioned or challenged without any fear that God would be angry that we didn’t understand. It is only in recent years that I’ve realized what a huge blessing this was! The freedom to question is not something everyone is taught or has experienced. Knowing that God could handle my questions was empowering, especially when I was struggling with things that I had been taught over the years.

There was a turning point in my mother’s childhood that underpinned everything and began my own journey. When she got in an argument with a Jewish friend over whether Jesus was Jewish or Christian, the girl called her mother who got a Bible and showed my mother that Jesus was Jewish. How had no one told her?!? From that point on, my mother internalized the belief that in order to understand Jesus you have to understand his Jewishness.

In order to understand Jesus, you have to understand His Jewishness

Because we were a Military family and lived all over the world, we mostly attended chapel on the bases where my dad was stationed, though we did occasionally find a nice local church of whatever flavor that suited us for that season. Military chapels are set up to have several chaplains of different backgrounds and each has a service time. They also fill in for one another as needed. At our last base, where I was a teenager, we had Chaplains who were Lutheran, Baptist, and Catholic.

Needless to say, when I got out on my own I was drawn to non-denominational/inter-denominational worship settings. It helped that questions were more welcome in those settings than they had been in the more traditional denominations I had encountered over the years.

I should also note that I went to church summer camps with friends for a few years and some winter events like tubing down the White River when we lived in Idaho. It was a Church of the Nazarene camp, but the church was in town and we lived on base so we didn’t ever go as a family and I couldn’t really go on my own. I find this interesting because it was at a Church of the Nazarene in a tiny town in Oklahoma that my grandmother got saved. And now I’m ordained through the Church of the Nazarene . . . there are more intersections and connections in my story as I look back. That’s just a small one. Stay tuned!

Part Two: God made me counter-cultural

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