Where are you now, Drew? And why did you do what you did? PART 1

Part 1: On the First Part of the Journey....

My name is Sylvia. I am now, and have always been, a Jewish Believer in Jesus, a.k.a. Yeshua the Messiah. You may have heard of the Jews for Jesus organization; I am very, very fond of them. Unfortunately, around 1986, I was the victim of an anti-missionary effort aimed at getting Jewish women, particularly young women of child-bearing age, to leave Christianity and turn back to unbelieving Judaism with promises of marriage, or at least relationships, with unbelieving Jewish men. I know that happened to me a long time ago, but the echoes of that experience are still with me, and I am still healing from a profound betrayal. I was 28 back then; I'm 50 going on 51 now.



Maybe if I tell my story to whatever part of the world is interested in hearing it, I can finish the healing process and forgive the pain once and for all. Maybe if others who have had similar experiences share them with me and with whatever part of the world will listen, they, too, may nudge themselves further along in the healing process. Maybe Drew, the anti-missionary who caused the damage, will understand what he did and will apologize. One way or the other, whether I write this out of my system the way I have done for so many other wounds, or whether I get closure some other way, I am bound and determined to be healed and to take others with me in healing if at all possible.


I will have to tell my story in at least a couple of parts because it is long. Here I go.

Sometime in 1985 or '86, I had heard about anti-missionary efforts by an orthodox Jewish organization which targeted Jewish Christians. This organization sent anti-missionaries, posing as Jewish Believers themselves, supposedly seeking to fellowship with other Jewish Believers, into churches that were known to have Jewish members. There aren't as many Jews in most churches as Gentiles, obviously, and Jewish Believers often get ostracized or even disowned by their families and friends, so Jewish Believers can be somewhat vulnerable to someone posing as a kindred spirit. Sometimes Gentile Christians have a hard time understanding Jewishness, which makes the Jewish Believer's life even a little more lonely.


In the 1980s, I was a divorced mother of a young son, lonely and depressed, struggling to love an often anti-semitic church and love my parents at the same time. The quiet desire of my heart was to find a man to be my spiritual partner and forever lover, but I didn't think this was likely to happen to me. I had heard of anti-missionaries before, and even warned members of my church about them, but I really couldn't conceive of someone coming after me -- a divorced mom who was overweight and rushing toward the end of her reproductive years. Who would do something like that to me? Who could even find me in this obscure, out-of-the-way little congregation at the southern end of Miami?



The church I was a member of at that time had a strange obsession with marrying people off. They were extremely uncomfortable with single people, especially divorcees. Although I truly desired to fall in love and remarry, I wasn't going to let myself fall into desperation about it. I didn't want to repeat the awful marriage I had found myself in with my son's father, so I prayed about it and left it in God's hands. If God re-married me with the right man, that would be wonderful. If I was meant to be single for the rest of my life, I would be OK.



Meanwhile, I was living at my parents' house, paying rent as best I could and trying to provide for my son. My parents hated my religion and refused to talk about God at all. They had never had any love for God or anyone's faith before I openly professed my faith, but after I started going to church, their attitudes became even more hostile. They didn't want to be practicing Jews themselves, but they sure didn't want me to be a practicing Christian. Never did I dream of the actual depth of their hatred for this aspect of my life until much, much later.



One day, one of the adult singles in the small, obscure church I attended came to me and excitedly told me about a man he'd invited to his home Bible study. The man's name was Drew, short for Andrew, and this man had just come to profess faith in Christ. Best of all, he was Jewish! I couldn't attend the Bible studies at that member's house on a regular basis because it was too far for me to travel every week, but Halloween was coming up, and there was going to be a costume party in lieu of the usual Bible study. I was invited with the express purpose of meeting Drew. No one made it a secret that they hoped I would hook up with this man.



I was a little bit excited, but cautiously optimistic as the first Mr. Bush would say a decade or so later. I went in the costume of a dental insurance saleswoman with blacked-out teeth and a big smile. I Drew showed up lat; I think he was wearing a Star Trek costume, complete with Vulcan ears. He saw me across the room, chubby and apparently lacking teeth; he seemed afraid of me and kept his distance. I finally realized that he must've thought I didn't have any teeth, so I took off the black tooth wax and introduced myself. He seemed rather relieved, but not entirely overjoyed to see me. He admitted that he was afraid that that was really what I looked like, and I reminded him that this was a costume party, and he certainly wasn't born with those ears, was he? He was very nervous and could not seem to relax at all, in spite of my friendly chit-chat. I wondered if this could be the man God Himself had picked out for me; if he was, then I should accept him as the human being he was and not judge him for being shy.



That's what I told myself that night, and that's what I told myself repeatedly over the course of our relationship. We dated for several months and seemed to be getting closer and more serious, but the man could never seem to relax. No matter where we were, he acted as though he thought people were watching us. I thought the answer to quelling his anxiety was to distract him with pleasant conversation and jokes; however, this didn't work the majority of the time. Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 23 years' distance, it is entirely possible that someone WAS monitoring us, making sure that he did and said all the right things. He certainly tried very hard to be Mr. Right. He tried talking about spiritual things a couple of times, but this made him desperately uncomfortable, and he always stuttered when God, Jesus or the Bible came up in conversation. Whenever we would eat together, I would ask him to bless the food, and he would say the kind of rote prayer that most everyone says, but then he would make a wisecrack at the end of the prayer, which I eventually came to understand meant that he hadn't believed anything he'd said up to that point. He tried very hard to be romantic with me, bringing me flowers every time he came to see me, but he never seemed to be natural about it. He even told me that he just couldn't show up without flowers because bringing flowers was the proper thing to do. I liked the sound of that: a man concerned with doing the right thing.

I should've known something was very wrong when he didn't really seem to be physically attracted to me. His kisses and hugs seemed passionless, but I told myself he was practicing self-control. I liked the fact that he wasn't all over me all the time the way other men I had dated in years past had been, but when he did put his arms around me, most of the time it was the kind of hug that a person gives a distant relative. It was hardly ever warm or relaxed. Unfortunately, I told myself that if God had sent Drew to me to be my husband, I had to give us time to adapt to each other. Things would work out just fine if I only gave him time.



Truthfully, I was charmed at first by what I thought was his shyness and vulnerable awkwardness, but then the awkwardness never really faded away as it should have once we got to know each other. He had claimed at first to be a brand-new Believer in Jesus, but he resisted everyone's attempt to teach him any depth of spirituality. He could never say the name "Jesus" without choking on it, and he finally admitted to me a couple of months into the relationship that although he read the Old Testament sometimes, he never read the New Testament. He just wasn't comfortable with it. He changed the subject when I told him he would never know the character of Jesus unless he read the rest of the Bible.



I began to see that something was wrong. This man was not now, and was not likely to become, my spiritual partner. He couldn't be the man God wanted me to marry, at least not yet. I prayed that God would show me what to do because I knew I could not allow myself to be partnered with an unbeliever, but it would also be wrong to turn my back on a lost soul. I was disappointed in the relationship and beginning to be rather heartbroken. I didn't know just how heartbroken I would become. And when I finally realized the entire truth about the situation, I would be devastated.

Part 2 is in the next blog entry....