It's been a long time, almost two years, since I last added an entry to this my blog. In my last entries, I told you about the book I was writing. The book is now complete, although it has not been published yet. In fact, it took me three months of intense writing, and approximately 300 pages to complete it, but it seems that just in that short time, enough happened to fill a new book.
Things around me got more and more intense, as if some war was raging around me, and I was somehow a target. I had to move away from my home, yet again, into a very poor neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv, where mostly refugees, foreigners, drug addicts and all the other destitute and lost reside.
It is a very long story, but the bottom line of it was that the same people who caused me great harm before, the people I trusted and served for about a decade whom then betrayed me, causing me to become destitute myself, had done it again, or rather, continued their evil actions which terribly hurt me before. I lost everything again, and found myself in a very tight and difficult situation.
If you read the first entries of my blog, you will see the hard road I had to take to forgive them. How Jesus helped me and healed me. How I forgave them and laid it all at His feet. But now I found myself facing the same people, who were laboring so hard, for some obscure reason, to destroy my life; people who were my best friends before.
And it seemed as if they were succeeding, I was now poor, rejected, scorned, falsely accused and most of all - incredibly lonely. All my friends turned their backs on me, I had no family to support me, and I remained alone, caring by myself for three young children.
It has been a year now since we had moved here, to the poorest, dirtiest, saddest and most neglected place in Israel. I find myself shedding tears of pain more often than not.
I do indeed feel like Job very often, and so I read the book of Job and found great encouragement in it, which I hope to share with you in the coming days.
I talk to God a lot, I talk to my Pappy in heaven, I talk to Jesus, and I talk to the Holy Spirit. I am in great need of their constant company, and seek it all the time.
I would not have survived without my God.
I confess that at times money appears in my purse as if out of nowhere, when there is nothing left at all.
When I cry out, God answers me, and makes me strong, even if just for a little bit longer...
Yesterday, for instance, I was crying, feeling sorry for myself. I was looking out of my window, seeing the filth and the neglect, and I felt like a piece of trash thrown to the garbage. "God, why did they throw me away like that?" I cried out from the bottom of my heart, remembering all that was.
"The stone that the builders rejected has now become the corner stone," I heard God's reassuring voice answering me.
"I have no home, Pappy," I sobbed.
"The foxes have their holes, and the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head," was the answer.
I understood.
"I was so fruitful before all this happened, spreading the Good News, and now, after, I have lost it all. I have lost the war, and it seems that Satan hates me for it, and does all he can to destroy me," I said to God, thinking of all the intense hostility I was suffering, which seemed to never cease.
"That is not true," I heard Jesus answer clearly. "Satan doesn't hate you because you lost, nobody hates losers - they may feel sorry for them, or even scorn them, but what reason does someone have to hate a loser? If they hate someone, it is the winner. Satan doesn't hate you because you lost, he hates me because I won. He hates you because you are mine."
I know times are incredibly hard. I live day by day, just as Jesus told us to do. I do not have all the answers, and hope to find them together with you.
Stay blessed, and stay tuned,
Alpha Omega
