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Now is the Time©

~ An excerpt from Chosen in Love ~

by

Leona Karni

(experienced in 1973)

"I’ll think about that sometime, "I said smiling as I closed the car door.

It was the same insincere response that I had been giving for over a year. It had been a year of turmoil and torment. I had gone through an ugly divorce, and my ex-husband had stolen my babies from me. It had been a year of Christians sharing their faith, as this most recent one had, and a year of me keeping my karma clean by telling them what I knew they wanted to hear—I’ll think about that. I had no intention of thinking about Jesus! I was a Buddhist! I was above the pat answers Christians had to offer! However, as a good Buddhist, I would not offend them by telling them the truth, so instead I lied, to keep my karma clean.

I know all about Jesus, I said to myself as I unlocked the door to my apartment.

"Who are you talking to?" asked Shawn, a friend who had spent the night.

"Oh, another one of those Jesus freaks was talking to me again today. I swear they are taking over the world! Every single day one of those freaks tries to convert me! Empty promises and hypocrites, that is what Christianity represents," I fumed as I grabbed a joint and took a hit. "You know when I was a kid my mother used to make me go to church with her. She is still praying for the salvation of my soul!" Shawn and I laughed together. "You should have seen her get upset with me the other day when I told her that Jesus use to smoke dope." I exaggerated my facial expression to demonstrate the horror in my mom’s reaction. Shawn laughed at my antics and stories of Jesus freaks as we finished smoking our joint. Then she left and once again I was alone.

"Now is the time to think about it." The command was a thought that existed outside of my mind yet invaded my entire being. It was God. I knew it was God. He was telling me to think about it! I was trapped in the web of my own insincere responses. I felt like my head was laid open, and God could see my every thought. I started to run in circles around the room, but I couldn’t hide. God was looking at my head, and He had told me to "think about it". In an effort to let Him know that I was going to do as He instructed, I said out loud, "I guess I should pray". With that I realized that I did not know how to pray. "What is the name of that church all those Christians go to?" I asked the empty room. "Calvary Chapel" came the thought. In a panic I picked up the phone and called information. "Could you please give me the phone number for Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa?" I asked the operator. All this time God was looking at my head!

"Calvary Chapel," hummed the receptionist answering my call.

"Look, I would like to pray. Could you please tell me how to address Him?" I nervously asked.

"He knows all about you; He has known all about you since before you were born," responded the voice on the other end of the line.

"I know that," I stated. He is here looking at my mind, and you are telling me He knows all about me I thought! "Could you please just tell me how to address Him?" I insisted.

"You can just call Him Father…"

I didn’t listen to the rest of her instructions, she was still talking when I hung up the phone. "Fa "I spoke the first syllable and started to laugh and cry at the same time. For a fraction of a second there was something familiar, but the feeling passed like a flash, and I was left with a deep sense of peace. I did not know what happened, but I knew that God was speaking to me, and it gave me a quiet sense of hope.

"God has told me to go to Israel," I informed my disbelieving family. It was easy to understand their doubt. They had witnessed me go into a tailspin over the loss of my sons. My daughters, parents and all of my family and friends had stood by helplessly while I escaped into drugs and alcohol to numb the pain. As far as they knew, this was just another place to run. My daughters did not want to go with me; they wanted to stay in the states with family. I had applied to three different Israeli embassies for a position as a volunteer on a kibbutz, but had been turned down by all three. I had very little money, barely enough to get me to Israel, and no hope of earning any along the way or once there. It didn’t take much to understand the fear my daughters had. Yet, this God, who had been speaking to me for several months, insisted that I was to go to Israel. I agreed to allow the girls to remain with family and on October 19, 1974 I left for Israel.

Obeying the voice of God in this matter had not been easy for me. I knew nothing about Israel, and I had this dread in the core of my being that I was going to die there. I could not understand why, if I was just going there to die, I couldn’t die in the states. Why was it necessary to go half way around the world? Because of this fear, I detoured for a month before finally arriving in the port at Haifa with less than fifty dollars.

"Prepare to show your passports and a least one hundred dollars at customs," instructed the voice on the loud speaker.

"That is just great," I lamented.

"What is wrong?" a friend I had made on the ship asked.

"I do not even have fifty dollars. They won’t let me enter the country with less than one hundred dollars," I answered.

"Here," she said, handing me British Sterling notes, "use this until you pass through customs."

I had returned the Sterling and was waiting for my backpack when a man (Otto) walked up to me and asked me "would you like to be a volunteer on a kibbutz".

"Where is the kibbutz?" I asked. Otto showed me on the map of Israel the location of his kibbutz. It was in the north and was bordered by Syria and Lebanon! I knew it! I knew I was going to die here I thought! But what choice did I have? I had very little money, and I knew no one in this country. "Okay," I agreed and boarded the bus with him heading for Kibbutz Dafna.

For three months I worked, slept and cried. As a volunteer, I only worked four hours a day. I had the early shift at the factory, so after ten in the morning, I was free. On a kibbutz your laundry is done for you, your meals are prepared and everyone eats in a central dining room, so all I had to do was clean my room and work four hours a day. With so much free time the memories of a lifetime worked their way into my consciousness. With memories of childhood abuse, devastating relationships, and the loss of my sons, I cried.

For years I had not been able to cry. Fear forbade it. I believed that if I gave expression to the suppressed sobs that I would be lost in the screams that begged release. Lost never to return. Drugs and alcohol had enabled me to escape and to wear a mask. But since God had started talking to me, I had stopped drinking and doing drugs—I now had no escape. So I cried. For three months I spent my afternoons crying: alone in my room a world away from the memories that tormented me. When the tears stopped, it was as though the sun had broken through. For the first time in my life, it was a clear day. Since this was a result of God in my life, and this God had brought me to Israel, and everyone in Israel was Jewish (in fact Jesus was Jewish I reasoned) I concluded that I should convert to Judaism.

"Ariella, your name is Ariella?" Yosi asked.

"Yes, "I responded. I had taken a Hebrew name when I started my Hebrew studies. I had just met Yosi in Elath, a city on the Red Sea. Some friends and I were camping on the beach together before going our separate ways: they to different parts of Israel and me back to the states. One of the girls knew Yosi, so he had come to visit us on the beach. He was a Yemenite Israeli who had been raised by an orthodox Jewish family. He had studied to be a rabbi and had become disillusioned; he was now in rebellion to his religion. We became instant friends, and I fell deeply in love. By the time my departure date arrived, we had decided that Yosi would travel with me to the states. We were married a short time later in Maryland, and with my daughters, returned to California. Yosi joined a local synagogue, and I kept a kosher kitchen and all the Jewish holidays. I had one step left to complete my conversion to Judaism—the ceremonial mikvah (baptism).

"Yosi," I started to calmly explain, "I have decided to study the Bible in Hebrew and compare it to the English. I want to prove for myself that Jesus was not the Messiah. If He is the Messiah, like the Christians say, then I can know that from the Torah (Old Testament). If I have any questions, I will ask you or the rabbi, because I don’t want to be influenced by the Christians."

"Okay," Yosi responded smiling "I will help you in any way I can." We had been back in California for a year, and I was meeting with a Rabbi to complete my conversion process. I had never been happier in my life. I loved Yosi, and I loved the Jewish rituals, but there was the nagging question of who Jesus was.

Several months after we arrived, I had also started attending Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa on Friday. I could not forget all those Christians who had shared with me in the year before this spiritual journey had begun. They all attended Calvary Chapel, therefore, Calvary Chapel had credibility with me. I had not embraced Jesus as the Messiah, but I loved His teachings. The pastor’s wife (Kay) taught a Women’s Bible study on Friday mornings in the Fellowship Hall of the church, and I attended these studies faithfully. There were two reasons that made this possible. First of all, they were on Friday mornings which worked well with my weekly schedule. In an observing Jewish home the week revolves around the Sabbath, which begins at sundown on Friday. Friday mornings I would go to the studies and then return home to prepare for the Friday evening meal. Also, since the study met in the Fellowship Hall I did not consider that I was going to church. At these studies I observed the women as well as Kay. They did not impress me as hypocrites, and the study of the Bible to learn how to be a godly woman was wonderful. Yosi had even noticed a change in me as I tried to apply what I was learning to my daily life.

Yet, I could no longer walk in two worlds. I had to make a decision. I wanted to complete my conversion process. That is why I decided to embark upon this course of study. In my heart I wanted to disprove Jesus and get on with my life. Yosi and the children left the house by 7:45 a.m. each day. I had all the hours of the day, until 3:45 p.m. to study. Monday through Thursday I studied for six to seven hours. Friday I went to the Bible study at Calvary; the hours I studied on Saturday and Sunday varied depending on family activities. Often during the week in the evenings when Yosi and the girls were watching television, I would go to the back of the house and study. Sometimes I would continue even after they went to bed.

I would study word by word comparing each word from my English Bible to the Hebrew Scriptures. When I ran into a problem or had a question, I would ask Yosi or call the rabbi. The Bible was becoming my reality. Tthat is where I spent most of my waking hours. I was so involved in this study that when Joseph and his brothers were reunited, I broke down and wept. After a year of this intensive study, I had only progressed to the book of Exodus. One day I was reading about the redemption of the first born. I noticed that a lamb was redeemed with a lamb, and that an ox was redeemed with an ox, but when it came to a jackass it was redeemed with a lamb or its neck was to be broken. That seemed strange to me, so I called the rabbi.

"Why is a lamb redeemed with a lamb and an ox redeemed with and ox, but a jackass has to be redeemed with a lamb?" I asked.

"Because a jackass is an unclean animal and is not suitable for sacrifice," he answered. Unclean was a word also used for gentiles. I was very sensitive to that. When I hung up the phone a question invaded my thoughts. It seemed to originate outside of me yet was personal. "Do you mean that this God that I know would make provision for an unclean animal and not make provision for unclean people?" I could not move from the chair. I was totally consumed by this question. Then, from someplace deep inside of me, an answer worked its way into my being. "No," I said out loud, "and the only provision I know that He has made is Jesus Christ. That means Jesus must be the Messiah." In that moment, my life was completely changed as I embraced Jesus as my Savior—that was almost thirty years ago.

Over the years in His tender way, He has brought healing to my body, mind and soul. Looking in my past through the lens of His love, I am able to see His faithfulness. He brought forward the memory of accepting Him as a child in the church my mother forced me to attend. I then understood why when I first uttered "Fa…", after calling to find out how to address Him, that there was that flash of familiarity. He enabled me to recall that after I had accepted Him, I burned with the desire to teach the Bible and to be a missionary. I could see in my mind’s eye me as a nine-year-old sitting behind the church office teaching Bible studies to nobody and dreaming of a life in service to Him. Pain and bitterness had robbed me of those dreams, but He had saved the memories for me.

As I grew in my faith, Yosi and I grew apart and sadly we divorced. Since that time, I have been involved in missions around the world. Great is His faithfulness. He has never left me nor forsaken me, and He has promised that He never will. Sometimes when I reflect on my testimony I laugh, and I believe the Lord laughs with me. For you see—I am the only person that I know of that came to the Lord through a jackass.

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