#4 From Unanswered Questions to Unquestionable Home: My Journey to Orthodox Judaism.

The Seeds That Were Always Jewish

I was raised in a devout Christian home. Church every Sunday, prayer before meals, the whole package. I loved Jesus with a child’s whole heart. But even as a little girl, something felt off....like I was wearing someone else’s coat that almost, did not quite, fit. Trauma came in my teenage years and even as an adult. When I brought my pain and my questions to pastors, the answers were always the same:  “Just read your Bible more.”  “Just pray harder.”  “Stop asking so many questions and just trust....”But I couldn’t stop asking. The harder I looked, the more the New Testament (especially the letters of Paul) seemed to undo the very Torah it claimed to complete. The idea that all I needed was to “believe in my heart” and my actions didn’t ultimately matter felt like a cosmic loophole. My soul rejected it violently. I wanted a faith that cared what I did with my hands, my mouth, my time, my body....every single day. And yet, through every dark season, especially during my years in the military....my connection to G-d never left me. In the silence of long nights, in moments of fear and uncertainty, I prayed with a fierceness that felt ancient. I just didn’t have the right address for those prayers. There were detours. In 2013, my first husband tried to pull me into a chaotic swirl of paganism and New Age spirituality. It was a disaster. When that marriage ended, and I remarried in 2020, I threw myself back into Christianity with everything I had—new church, new devotionals, desperate for the stability I thought it could give me. The questions never quieted.

The Loss That Tore the Veil

April 2023. After a perfect pregnancy, I gave birth to my stillborn son. The Christian platitudes arrived within hours:  “It was God’s plan.”  “He’s in heaven now.”  “God needed another angel.”  “One day you’ll understand why this was for the happened.”Those words didn’t comfort me. They enraged me. They painted G-d as a capricious tyrant who kills babies to teach lessons or to fill vacancies in a celestial choir. I wanted to scream. In the wreckage of that grief, I did what felt most primal: I opened a Chumash and started reading from the beginning. Not the New Testament. Not the Psalms. Genesis. The story of Abraham and Sarah.... her barrenness, longing, promises made and almost broken, a G-d who lets a mortal man argue with Him over the fate of cities. And there it was. A G-d who wrestles.  A G-d who listens.  A G-d who makes covenants instead of issuing incomprehensible decrees. In those pages, I saw my own pain reflected...not explained away, not spiritualized into a “greater purpose,” but held. Named. Carried forward into a promise. I kept reading. I discovered Job shaking his fist at heaven. Jeremiah accusing G-d of deceiving him. The Psalmist demanding, “Why have You forsaken me?”...And then the second revelation, even bigger than the first:  Judaism is not primarily about what you believe in order to secure a ticket to the afterlife.  Judaism is about what you do, here, now, in this broken world, to repair it...one mitzvah at a time. My son’s death did not have to be a test I passed or failed. It could be the fire that refined me into someone who would live differently, love differently, serve differently. This is where the beauty began to shine in the darkness, a light...a Lapid!

The Pregnancy That Brought Me Home

For months after the stillbirth, my husband and I tried to conceive again. Month after month of negative tests. The powerlessness was its own kind of death. In that desert, I finally surrendered....not to despair, but to the truth that some things are simply not in my hands. I had to let go of trying to control everything and realize....The only thing I could control was how I showed up each day. So I started taking care of the body that had carried both life and death: clean food, long walks, therapy, and prayer that had no words. Almost exactly one year after we lost our son, I saw two pink lines......During that pregnancy, something shifted irreversibly...... The questions I had carried for thirty years became too loud to ignore:  Why don’t Christians keep the Torah that Yeshua himself kept?  Why did we replace Passover with Easter, Sukkot with Christmas, Shavuot with Pentecost? The answers I found were not merely intellectual. They were recognition. The structure I had craved my entire life was waiting for me in the rhythm of Jewish time....Shabbat every seven days, festivals that retell our national story with food and fire and joy, 613 mitzvot that turn every ordinary act into a meeting place with the Divine. This was not a new religion.  This was the home I had been circling my whole life.

Conversion: The Front Door at Last

In October 2024, alone in my room, tears streaming down my face, I finally said the words out loud that I had been carrying in my heart for decades:  “I want to come home.”That was the moment I officially began my formal conversion to Orthodox Judaism. The process is not easy. Orthodox conversion demands everything—years of study, total life transformation, immersion in a community that will watch me closely and love me fiercely. I am learning Hebrew that feels like mother-tongue. I am learning to bend my will to 613 commandments that feel less like rules and more like love letters written in fire on Sinai. Some days I am overwhelmed. Some days, I cry from exhaustion. Every day I wake up and whisper modeh ani with tears in my eyes because I finally know where I am. I am not becoming someone new.  I am becoming who I always was. The G-d I cried out to in the darkest nights of grief, in the silence after my son’s heart stopped beating...He was never the distant deity of Christian theology. He was always the G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The G-d of Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, and Leah. The G-d who wrestled with me in the dark and let me walk away limping, blessed, and finally, finally named. Baruch HaShem.  I wandered for forty years in someone else’s wilderness.  Now I am home....inside the covenant, inside the nation, inside the embrace of the King who never stopped waiting for me to find the door. One mitzvah at a time, I am learning how to live with Him.  And I have never felt more alive.