Part 4
Over the past 23 years, I have learned Christ's message of forgiveness. It is necessary to release those who "trespass against us" so that we can live. Unfortunately, the ways that I have been harmed are deep, chronic, and multi-layered. I have had to forgive many people over and over again for the same abuses, simply because there was an anger layer and a fear layer, and a layer of rejection, and a layer of sadness, and they all don't always pop up at the same time from the same stimulus. Thank God for that, because the pain of all the many layers of harm all playing themselves out at the same time is so bad that I often feel I am going to die from it. So forgiveness has been in layers and stages. Unlike God's forgiveness, which is once for all time, my flawed human forgiveness takes practice, and it takes courage. It takes a willingness to give up my right to punish the offender and let God work on his or her heart.
It takes honoring the pain that was caused, loving the tender-hearted, vulnerable soul that I am who was injured and devalued, and then turning to God, Who knows exactly who I am and how I feel, and giving my experiences back to Him. This is the only way I know to heal. It is like performing surgery on myself, very painful, but it is very, very effective. In Jesus' name, and by the healing power of the Holy Spirit, I surrender my right to punish those who have harmed me. My sins were covered and paid for by the Messiah's blood; the sins of those who have harmed me were also loved by God and also have that payment available to them. Therefore, I can't put myself above God. If God is ready to forgive, then I have to.
23 years after Drew tried to strand me in a dangerous section of town, I started looking up Messianic Congregations in Miami for a friend who was interested in worshipping Messianic style. While surfing for this information, I stumbled into a Jewish anti-missionary, anti-messianic website, and my relationship with Drew came tumbling back to me. The nagging questions which were never answered came racing back; the nonsensical money insult still nagged at me. Why would anyone associate money at all with that relationship?
And then it dawned on me as horrifyingly clear as a tidal wave shining in the sun. Drew was an anti-missionary, I am certain of that, but who sent him? There was no one left to ask. Drew doesn't seem to have an e-mail address on yahoo or gmail, not one that is linked to his name, so he's unavailable for comment. I'm not going to stalk him by phone, even though he stalked me by automobile. I'm sure he would deny the whole thing, anyway.
So why Drew, and why me?
I realized, suddenly, that there had to be money involved. He had moved from what he had told me was a good life in another state out west, a place he regretted leaving and missed very much. He would never explain why he moved, why it seemed he HAD to move. He didn't have a job waiting for him in Miami, and he didn't have a place to live. He roomed with his mother, and if I remember correctly, he slept on her couch. Who put him up to this? Had he been called into service as an anti-missionary to move across the continent and marry me? I was sure he wouldn't have done this for free.
Oh, no. No, no. But it had to be true. My stepfather still had ties through his extended family to the ultra-orthodox community in New York where he had grown up. He had money which he had squirreled away for many years. My mother and he must have paid someone to arrange that relationship, to make me a target for an anti-missionary. At the point of their desperation to drag me away from the church, they wouldn't have cared less who I got paired up with. Any Jewish man would do as long as he himself wasn't Christian and wasn't too nauseatingly religious himself.
They paid...they paid...they PAID a man to get me to fall in love with him. They PAID a man to try to marry me, to force me to decide between the Messiah and a last chance at marriage. They must have figured that I would leave the Messiah for a man, any man, who would consent to marry me.
How pathetic they must have thought I was, how desperate, how pitiful. In their twisted view of the universe, nothing was more important to a single woman than getting a man. Certainly the damaged goods that I was -- divorced mother of a small child, overweight, depressed -- would jump at the chance to settle for whatever man would have me. It must have been beyond their comprehension that I would put God before the promise of marriage, but I did.
They couldn't speak to me for a month because they had secretly paid out an unnamed amount of money, probably a lot for 1986, to buy me a husband, and I had sweetly turned him down. How much, I wonder? How much to take me out on cheap dates? And how much to marry me once I had been completely roped in?
Was that what my ex-future-mother-in-law was talking about? But at the moment she was screaming, I hadn't broken up with Drew yet. Drew hadn't lost any money on me yet.
Or had he? Had my ultra-stingy stepfather gotten Drew to leave his comfortable life out west and move to Miami, with the promise of a dowry once he married me? Don't laugh, dear reader, and don't scoff. Orthodox Jews still think in terms of dowries and bride prices. It's Jewish tradition which is thousands of years old, but it's not something they could have admitted to me. I would never have agreed to that; I am devastated and disgusted to have been bartered like a piece of baggage. I've spent days weeping over this last degradation from my disowning parents.
Did Drew spend his last dime moving to Miami for me, only to have me refuse him?
Did my mother and stepfather offer him a cozy life in exchange for these services?
Why didn't they simply set up me and my son with a place to go instead of offering this money to a stranger, if they wanted me out of the house? Why spy on me and plot against me when I would have been so happy, so blessed, to be out from under their roof?
I would like to have answers to these questions, but I don't think anyone still alive is willing to tell me the truth. Drew has no e-mail that I know of. Neither does my stepfather, and even if would communicate with me, he would lie about his involvement. My mother passed away in 1995, but even if she still lived, she would deny everything.
Drew, if you can read this, how much did my parents pay you to date me? What was the agreement? How much to marry me? And how were you going to live with yourself in a loveless marriage?
Well, this is my story, and typing all these words has given me some catharsis. I may never get my answers or my closure, but I will continue my healing process and get as close to closing this door completely as I can. Now that I have uncovered the awful truth, I realize that it could have been so much worse. Some victims of Jewish anti-missionaries get kidnapped, beaten and humiliated in an effort to "deprogram" them. Other Jewish Believers are disowned and thrown out on the street; some of them have relatives who put contracts out on their lives. I'm lucky I only got my heart broken instead of my legs, but I still have wounds that need healing.
The world hated Messiah Jesus first. Of course it hates us as well. I would like for others with similar experiences to please share them with me so that we may both get insights into the healing process. I will blog more as I progress.
Faithfully yours,
Sylvia
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