When Pain Demands a Purpose: How a Jewish Girl from Miami Made Her Way Into the Catholic Church

This morning, I woke up with no direction. It’s not that I was lost, it’s in fact quite the opposite. It’s that I have found myself in a completely different place than where I started.

As I opened up my roll of daily digital memories, I realized that today was the tenth anniversary of the day I was reborn. Ten years ago today, I said yes to God and was baptized in the Catholic Church. I was 37 years old.

As a Jewish convert to the faith, my journey began long ago when I was a young, devout, religious child who went to temple. I loved God with all my heart and longed for Him daily. I found Him at Shabbat dinner, the high holy holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and at Saturday youth services. I loved everything about being Jewish- my culture, my heritage, and especially the traditions and customs that come along with Judaism. But I felt I was missing something, something deeper and bigger than me. I had always had these questions since I was a young child- questions about God, heaven, and the afterlife that I couldn’t seem to get answered by the rabbi, no matter how hard I tried.

I first heard of Jesus as a young middle schooler and asked my Rabbi about Him and what we believed about Him. I asked a lot of questions of the rabbis that they shunned or simply didn’t want or know how to answer. I figured out that at some point I would have to make the spiritual trek of truth on my own, knowing that there was a God but unsure how to find Him.

My journey was complicated by trauma and a move across the country that took me away from everything that I knew. Leaving my home in South Florida brought with it a host of other complex issues, including encountering antisemitism and leaving my beloved grandmother back home in Miami. To say that my heart was shattered would give it less meaning. My heart was beyond repair.

I tell people that my conversion happened overnight while simultaneously being a lifetime in the making. My search for truth was predicated on a simple question: What was my purpose on this earth? This is the question that drove me to read books, attend a diversity of religious services, and visit countless religious institutions. The need for me to understand my divine purpose drove every part of my life. This was especially true when it came to my trauma. My pain demanded a purpose.

I was one of those people who was always asking why bad things happened to good people. After reading the famous book with the same title, it answered no more of my questions than did my speaking into the wind. Then my faith journey hit a wall when my grandmother died in 2007. I told God, “I’ll go my way, and you can go yours.”

I have learned from my truth-seeking journey into faith that you have to be willing to risk everything for the truth. You even have to allow yourself to be angry with God. Without feeling all the feelings, making mistakes, and heading down the wrong roads, the journey would simply be you standing still, and I certainly was not going to stand still.

It wasn’t until years later that a personal life event triggered my trauma and sent me down a road that this time, I did not know how to navigate on my own. I was used to possessing my independence and having an innate and fierce inward courage that allowed me to navigate life up to this point. But this time, I truly could not walk one step further.

I had to be willing to open my mind, surrender, lose it all, and give it all away to find God. This time, I could not do it on my own. I started listening to that small, inner voice, which I now know as the whispers of the Holy Spirit. This led me to find Jesus and to accept Him as the Son of God and the Lord of my life.

Giving my life to God has changed everything. It has strengthened my marriage, my parenting, and given me an identity that no longer belongs to the world. I do not make decisions on my own anymore; I seek wisdom from Christ and pray through and discern everything. I have also come to realize, as a Catholic, that my life is not my own- when I get inside my feelings or too far into my own headspace, I realize that I am here to serve and not to be served. I realize that I am here to serve God’s children in a variety of capacities that He assigns me to do so.

All this garnered from one look at a picture from my baptism. I now thank God that He demanded my old life and replaced it with the new one that He scripted for me. As a writer, I appreciate the sacred craft of God’s pen writing a new script to my reborn life. Just when I thought it was the end of my story, God had only just begun.