Sanctify them in Your Truth; Your Word is Truth.
~ Yeshua

Our lives are always in flux; things are always changing and shifting, often demanding a conforming to some thing or some idea or some unwanted situation. I am not a person who likes change. I crave routine because it gives me the illusion of control over chaos.

The last year has brought changes. Many of them drastic. Most of them unwelcome. All of them chaotic. I have fought for peace and it has been slow to come. I have prayed long pleading prayers and I have slept upon tear soaked pillows. I have grieved deeply destructive decisions not my own and most certainly beyond my ability to control. I have wrestled with Adonai. I have spent more time on my knees than on my feet. I have begged for answers to my infinite lists of whys. In utter exhaustion, I have submitted not knowing final outcomes, but faithfully trusting in Him alone.

I knew before I wrote the letter the result might be that my only living son would never speak to me again. The anguish of the thought almost stayed my hand. Satan, smelling my fear, taunted as I wrote words, wrote Adonai’s Truth to an unbelieving son. No matter how gentle, no matter how loving, I knew the reaction would be swift and harsh because I knew the accusation would be, “You love God more than you love me.” The accusation a truth I would not be able to deny. The one and only Truth convicts and causes a visceral reaction in the unbeliever. And what I feared most did happen. He stopped all communication with me. At first I gave it a little time, let the Truth do its work and let the hurt I knew he felt settle like dust to hopefully one day be swept away. Then one Friday, as I busied about preparing for Shabbat, as I tended to preparing my heart for this sacred time with Yeshua, I sat down and sent the first text. Just simple loving words from a mother to a son. And for almost three months this went on: me faithfully sending texts and hoping for response and no response coming. Then the hope I had been tending to, it sprouted up. On the evening of my birthday in early December, a text appeared wishing me well with hopes that my birthday had been nice.

Oh, the joy of an answered prayer!

I responded. No more words were returned. When Friday rolled around, I sent my usual text. This time I added how much his birthday well wishes had meant to me, that it had been the highlight of my week. Silence was the response. So I took the gift I had been given and gave gratitude to Adonai as I tended the little sprout of hope that more words would one day appear. And on the next Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of mundane chores, while sweeping and dusting and toilet cleaning, they arrived. I continued to be faithful each Friday, and each text was now getting a response. It was not long before he would answer texts on other days as well. But his birthday was fast approaching and I wanted to hear his voice. Being unsure of his work schedule, I sent him a birthday text and ended with, “ I wanted to call, but thought you might be working.” He was, but told me he would love to talk the next day. And we talked and we laughed, just as if there was never a break in the relationship. And now, the texts began to come unprompted, on random days and at random times, sometimes multiple times in a week.

Oh, the joy of a merciful loving gift from Adonai to soothe a mama’s aching heart!

While our stances of what constitutes truth and sin and whether God exists remain at odds, restoration of our relationship has begun. Adonai continues to move in ways unexpected and still beyond my finite human understanding, but through the wrestling and the praying and the submitting, I have been conformed to be a little more like Yeshua. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”

And praying does change me, because the truth is, I am not meant to remain unchanged. Adonai and His Truth are the only ones with that attribute. I am meant to be sanctified and sanctification requires a perpetual state of change. I am meant to bear an image not my own. And this sanctification comes at a cost not my own. It comes at the cost of a King being mocked and beaten and spit upon. It comes at the cost of a Savior crucified. It comes at the cost of His life laid down in obedience to the Father will, in love for those He came to save, for it is the only way our relationship with the Father can be restored.

And oh, the joy of this unmerited gift of grace!

We are called to love first and foremost, to love God and to love our neighbor. Too often, we acquiesce in one way or another to the demands of the world and its definitions of truth and love. Even some of us Christians, who ought to know better, have redefined and perverted what God’s love really is, and then preach it as truth – some watered-down version of the gospel that will never quench the thirst of a lost and weary soul. Remaining silent as someone walks down a path of sin is not love. In these situations, we are required to offer Truth in hopes they will turn to Yeshua. Truth can not do its work without love. Truth without love turns people away from Yeshua, not to Him. And loving God and loving our neighbor means speaking His Truth, not some perverted form of it; to speak it gently and lovingly, what ever the cost to us. We must lay our life down in obedience for the love of our Redeemer and King knowing it might cost us everything; in fact, Yeshua tells us it will. Yeshua must be the greatest love of our life, greater even than our husbands and our children. He must be our first love because only then can we love as He loves, only then is His Truth spoken in love, only then are we conformed to His image and not our own. And of one thing I am certain: this world needs a whole lot more of Yeshua and a whole lot less of us.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established,
that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
~Blaise Pascal