John 4:10
Jesus answered her and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
I had a difficult time at the University of Texas. I had no idea how hard it would be when I started in 1983. After making A’s and B’s at Austin High School, (on the “Honors Graduation Plan,” no less!) I was making B’s and C’s at UT. After my trip to England in 1986 with my childhood friend Carol, I came back to school and gave up on my business degree in favor of an English degree. I also gave up taking 15 hours a semester in favor of only 12 hours. I was just not able to work 20 hours a week, take 15 hours a semester, keep my sanity, and make the kind of grades I wanted to make. (That same semester, fall of 1986, was the time I met my birth mother, which is a story worthy of it’s own attention.)
My change of major created much strife between myself and my parents who didn’t understand the mental stress I was under, first from meeting my birth family, and second from having to cope with the terminal illness and finally death of my friend Carol, the one I’d travelled to England with the Summer of 1986.
So during the summer of 1987, because I’d tried to slow down a bit, I still had four classes I had to take to finish my degree. The days went like this that summer: I would go to classes in the mornings, then visit my friend Carol in the afternoons at St. David’s hospital across the street.
One of the classes I took was a music class, an ethno-musicology class, to be exact. We were learning about music and culture and how our American pop-music is not what we think it is. I read all the material, took the tests, and made A’s, much to my surprise, in the midst of my stress that summer. I loved the professor, Stephen Feld, who told stories of his Jewish upbringing in a Yiddish speaking community in Philadelphia. He’d also been to Papua New Guinea and other exotic places. But I think I liked him because he made Judaism seem attractive to me. He wasn’t even a practicing Jew. His Jewishness was more an ethnicity that he tried to understand and study than a faith that he tried to practice, I think. I would invite him to speak for himself about this. But still, he was my favorite professor, and he made Judaism attractive, because he made it sound like a family, and I desperately wanted to be grounded in a family. It’s been a sorrow in my life that I’ve had such a fractured family. Each part of my family feels like it’s own denomination, with no unity among the factions. I love them all, but it feels like the only time all the groups will ever be together will be at my funeral.
Anyway, for years I thought about converting to Judaism. Not really seriously, but still, I thought about it. One day, after reading more about the Jewish faith and what it took to convert, I decided that what I needed to do was talk to a Rabbi. I remember deciding this as I was getting in my car and driving out of my apartment parking lot. I remember thinking, as I turned right onto Spicewood Lane toward Spicewood Springs Road, “I’ll just go talk to a Rabbi.”
In a flash, a thought came, I believe, from outside of me, into my brain. It sounded like a voice, audible only in my spirit. The voice was calm. I think it was the Holy Spirit, or God. It was authoritative and did not repeat itself. The voice said, “If you do that, you will be denying that Jesus is my son.” I felt no anger in the voice. I felt completely free at that moment to choose my own path. Still I took note that the voice said, “. . .Jesus is ‘my’ son.” I had not been to church in at least 3 years. Church and Christian faith was not part of my life. I had drifted away. I thought the word Christian was just a label with no meaning, really. I had let myself believe that the Trinity was unimportant because my faith was so weak and elementary. But when that voice sounded in my spirit, I recognized it. How?
And I never again, from that moment on, (even with the respect I have for the Jews), thought seriously about denying the sonship of Christ. So obviously, I couldn’t become Jewish. I didn’t (and still don’t) know exactly what will become of the Jews at the end of the world although I do trust in God’s mercy. As for me, I knew then that I was a (baptized) Christian, and I belonged to God. I had graciously been given the opportunity to decide who Christ was, and I couldn’t go back on that.
Today, I wonder if it was my baptism that helped me hear the voice of God that day driving out of my apartment parking lot. I thank my mom for pushing me down the aisle at Joppa Church one June Sunday roughly 15 or 16 years before, when I made my profession of faith. I was too shy to go on my own, so I needed a push. I was baptized the next weekend in Bertram, although I believed at the time that my baptism was just a formality. Now, as I Catholic, I’m deeply grateful to God for giving me a mom who would push me down the aisle to start my faith journey.
It’s interesting to note that one step I would have undergone had I converted to Judaism would have been a ritual bath called a mikveh. But the mikveh was like the baptism of John not the baptism of Jesus. God has taken care of these details in his plan for salvation for the world. I didn’t have to worry about any of the laws, rules or details.
All I had to do was listen, and be obedient to His voice.
Acts 18:24-28
Now a Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he was speaking and teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus, being acquainted only with the baptism of John; and he began to speak out boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And when he wanted to go across to Achaia, the brethren encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him; and when he had arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
