When I agreed to follow Jesus, I had no idea what I was getting into. I was forty years old, and had spent most of my life alternately yearning for and avoiding a deeper relationship with God. When I was in my early teens, I went to a Jewish summer camp in the San Bernardino mountains. Out in the clean, woody air, high above the Los Angeles smog, we hiked, swam, practiced archery and leather crafts, and told the same stories around bonfires as the kids at the scout camp on the other side of the fence. The difference was that our counselors added a side dish of Israeli folk songs and Yiddish folk wisdom to remind us that we were different from the cultural Christianity that surrounded us. In case we forgot that lesson, we only had to turn on our contraband transistor radio, where the only station we could get through the hiss of static played a combination of she-done-me-wrong country ballads and me-and-my-Jesus gospel songs.
Many evenings, as we sat around the dying campfire, some of us would argue about what we believed or didn’t believe. The God that was presented to us by our progressive rabbis was not some old man in the sky, meddling in human affairs and looking for reasons to send people to hell, but rather an impersonal, unknowable, unnamable, unfathomable, abstract Being that was beyond all descriptions. “I am what I am,” was all that this inscrutable deity had to say to us humans, which seemed like very cold comfort to this shy, lonely, bookish teenager who was unsatisfied with all the theological arguments and had no language or images for spiritual experience.
About the same time, I began somewhat surreptitiously to read the New Testament in my father’s Masonic bible. There, I discovered a Jewish teacher who told stories, healed people of their illnesses, and talked about good news for those who had nothing and no one to rely on. This Jesus wasn’t what I expected to find when I went out into the wilderness.* Instead of a dogmatic heretic sending people to hell, this Jesus said that the realm of God was in us and around us all the time, that the lowliest person who knows this is more important than anyone who has done great deeds in the ordinary way of looking at things, and that loving our neighbors and forgiving those who have harmed us is the pathway to knowing and loving God.
I have now been following Jesus for more than 30 years. As I live into the waiting time of Advent, Jesus still keeps surprising me by showing up in new places, saying odd things, and pointing out God’s presence in unexpected situations. More and more, I have come to know that God is in this here, this now, and that God is also in the future, whatever it will bring. What is your earliest memory of yearning for God? What did you expect to happen when you decided to follow Jesus? What are you waiting for?
–Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church
