My Testimony
My testimony…. As a little girl I had never heard the gospel. My only connection to what I thought was Christianity was Santa Claus at Christmas and the Easter bunny at Easter. My father was agnostic, my mother claimed to be Jewish. I was raised in the Jewish faith…sort of. We celebrated holidays although not in the manner I was taught was correct according to the teaching I received in an all girl Orthodox Yeshiva. My folks sent me to the Yeshiva not because of their faith but because public schools where we were living were terrible. The result: I would recite the Ahmeda (Jewish standing morning prayer) reading from a siddur (prayer book) in Hebrew every morning. As far as I knew, my father never prayed and the only time my mother prayed was to say Kaddish for the dead. They certainly did not know that their youngest child prayed to God whenever she was afraid or onely or when she felt she was being treated unjustly. I never shared that with them. I never shared it with anyone.
When my time at Bais Miriam was over, I went to a secular public school. That was where religion was drummed out of me and replaced with secular humanism. Oh, I had some notions about God being everywhere and some of my “new” ideas were quite pagan. One thing I always felt deep inside was that every part of nature obeyed God better than I did. I was sure a bird never complained to God that it wasn’t a horse, a horse never asked God why it was not a tree. But we....okay, I... wanted to be more than what I was.
Fast forward from school days to me at 29. I was a travel counsellor and had been one since I was 21 years old. That year I took my mom with me on a wonderful trip. We flew from JFK to Paris, then took a train from Paris to Marseille where we boarded a cruise ship that stopped at 2 ports in Italy, then on to Greece where one of the stops was Patmos. That had no significance to me other than the pretty mosaics in a primitive church and the lovely landscape looking over the Mediterranean. Our cruise ended in Haifa. On the cruise I made a connection with a man who turned out to be a Roman Catholic priest - this is not something my mother was thrilled about but she felt "well at least he is not a Moslem." It was in Israel that I received and read my first copy of the New Testament. Please understand that if you are trained as a believing Jew, reading the New Testament is considered a sin. The Gospel of Matthew floored me. I had soooooo many questions and nobody but the Roman Catholic priest to ask those questions. He did not have the answers. That copy did not even have the Gospel of Luke and I had no idea it was missing! It was produced and sold as a souvenir. At the end of the time in Israel I sent my mother home and my best friend and I continued our trip by flying to Spain and going about Europe for another 3 weeks. My friend was born and raised as a Roman Catholic and she had zero knowledge of the Bible despite having attended Saint Mary Star of the Sea Catholic parochial school. She wanted me to get over this whole thing because it was "not healthy for me." Don’t be hard on her; from her view I was a little looney and she thought it was mostly because of the attachment that I had formed with Pino (the priest). Well, I got back home and after some sensible assessments (at least I thought they were sensible) I resumed my normal life. I didn’t throw that Bible away, nor did I read it. Instead I kept it on my nightstand.
A year passed. My best friend’s sister ended up living with me and my mom because her folks couldn’t bear her any longer. She was fresh out of a mental hospital and was both going to a conservative Baptist church and a house Bible study. She kept pestering me about going to the Bible study. She wore me down. I finally went and was totally turned off by the man who led the study. I thought he was the most misogynistic, arrogant, bossy man I had ever been misfortunate enough to meet. I was incensed. I said I never wanted to see or speak to him again. I was back the next week. My reason was to prove him wrong. The flaw in that argument was while I found him personally distasteful, he was preaching the gospel. Not the prosperity gospel. Not the social gospel. He was preaching the one true Gospel. “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12) And so it was, that the word pierced me even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow.
By the following week I was on my knees in my bedroom seeking forgiveness for my sins and asking for the Spirit to make me new and whole. That was in my 30th year. I will be 74 years old this June. The Lord has taken me through some, shall we say, very unusual twists and turns but through it all He has been there. He has never failed.
- Sis. June Williams
