A Good Jew's Passionate Experience of Christ

By Rosalind Stanley 

Growing up, my siblings and I were the only Jews in our town, the only Jews in our school, and the only Jews most of our friends had ever known or would ever know. Do you know what that made me? Special. A de facto expert on all things Jewish, and – to my rural-Maine friends – all things New York, by extension.  

At the risk of seeming full of myself, I pitied my friends, all of whom I assumed were Christians. They weren’t Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, or Muslims, after all. What else was left? The fact that Christian is not a catch-all term never occurred to me. They only got two holidays a year. They didn’t get extra days off from school. They didn’t get to go to an empty Chinese buffet or an empty movie theater on Christmas Day. What good was some ephemeral sense of “belonging,” I figured when compared to all of that ? 

Beginning around the time of my bat mitzvah ¹ , that ease gave way to a growing sense of…restlessness? Discontent? Even disgust, sometimes? God, who had always felt as near to me as my own father, seemed distant. Things that had always been easy were suddenly hard. Looking around, I realized how few true believers – in anything – I knew. My Jewish friends seemed only to be in it for the bagels; my Christian friends were only in it for the presents in December and the chocolates at Easter. Talk about God, or Law, or Truth, to any of them, and their eyes would glaze over. It turned out that my parents were feeling a similar sense of dis-ease, so we found an Orthodox shul ² to attend and began an eight-year deep dive into Orthodox Judaism. 

There is so much more to this story, so much more I could tell: the prayers from well-meaning strangers that made me roll my eyes; the increasing desperation with which I clung to Judaism, always thinking if I could just do more, know more , I’d feel safe again; the years – 15, to be exact – of anger and depression that came to a head one rainy November morning when I finally acknowledged my sin; the children – four of them, through whom God showed me little pieces of himself; the pastor that brought my parents to faith my junior year of college and then dealt with the aftermath (me); the man who was my friend before he ever tried to convert me and who held me when I cried about how scary and infuriating it was to change so much and so fast – after 13 years of marriage, he hasn’t stopped yet.  

I know God had my salvation all worked out before I was even born, and I know that he’s still holding my yet-unsaved siblings closely, but… if I’m honest... When someone asks me for my story, it still feels like it started one winter night in 2004 when God used a new movie, an old Bible, and a conversation between father and daughter to point me in the right direction.