God can do anything. Of this I am firmly convinced. How He forms families is beyond me, simultaneously both wild and wonderful.

I have family members to whom I do not feel particularly related, and non-blood relatives to whom I would give my last drop of blood. My husband and I share no genetic connection (and that’s more than some of you can say!), other than forefathers who had large noses and foremothers who had moustaches (his side, of course). But we are strongly related, even if not by blood.

For us, Hanukkah and Christmas are totally normal, not a stretch of the imagination by any means. The fact that Hanukkah (the Feast of Dedication), a Jewish holiday, is mentioned only in the New Testament (John 10), and that Christmas celebrates a virgin birth with God coming to dwell among us, does not require me to suspend any rational powers of reason. But then I don’t believe in Santa Claus, so maybe I’m not mainstream these days.

I look at 324 Messianic prophecies written in the Hebrew Bible, hundreds and thousands of years before, telling when, where, and what the Messiah would do. Mathematicians say that if only one person fulfilled 48 prophecies (not 324), the odds of that would be one to 1… followed by 157 zeros! But one person fulfilled all 324 and His name is Jesus.

I’ve heard all of the other arguments: that Israel is the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53, etc. For many years, it was thought that dishonest Christians, monks hidden away in some monasteries, had pencilled in this chapter that describes Yeshua to a T. But with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls only six decades ago, we see the same prophecies included in manuscripts dating 1,000 years previous to anything in existence up until that time. There goes that theory.

This brings to mind the famous short story penned by Jewish American novelist Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews”. It tells the story of teenager Ozzie Freedman in post World War II America and his theological questions posed to the local rabbi. The rabbi insists that the virgin birth of Jesus is impossible, which leads to a showdown with Ozzie on the synagogue rooftop, refusing to come down until Rabbi Binder answer why, if God is all-powerful, why He could not create a Divine birth if He chose.

Winner of a 1960 National Book Award, the story raises important issues faced by many families such as ours. Not just how Jews can believe in Jesus, but for us, it goes a step farther when you add the mix of adoption.

Our children are ours through adoption, not blood. I have no problem with this. We chose this route. I see it as Divine dealings in the affairs of man, the children being rescued from pain and suffering, none of it their own making. We discussed it one recent day in the car, where all good conversations take place until an ice cream shop looms on the horizon. I had just dropped the boys at one activity, and the girls were headed to their own sporting event.

“It’s only us three girls,” Sashenka giggled in the back seat. “Just like in Russia, da, Mama?”

They couldn’t get over the fact that I could drive, or take care of them, or do any of a variety of things unknown to their previous little patch of Russian countryside.

“Da…. Can you imagine, out of the all of the people in the world (and there are six billion), how we ended up together? God saw you and He saw us, and He put us all together in a family,” I start.

“And Misha and Grisha,” Mashenka adds, reminding me of the dogs…as though I would forget! If ever there was a closer connection, I did not know of any. Slit our paws and mingle our blood, and you could not have a stronger bond.

I continue.

“Did you know that Mama and Papa met in Israel? We were from different places, but we ended up working there together. That’s how God can bring people together from all around the world, people who are just right for each other.”

“Wasn’t Jesus from Israel?” Sashenka wondered, her almost-nine-year-old brow furrowed in thought. The girls were similar to Ozzie Freedman, trying to make sense of it all.

“Yes, He lived in Israel.” I acknowleged, anticipating more questions about Divine plan and intent…..

“So when you were very, very young, did you see Him there?”

Talk about pause for thought-!

“Um, no, honey. He was before my time….” I say slowly.

Or was He?

Jesus the promised Messiah is for all time, and for all people. He is the creator of all individuals, and all families, coming to dwell with us, renew us, and make us whole. He is the therapist par excellence, the redeemer who will save us from our sins, and save us from ourselves.

I have a favorite song, one among many, for this time of year. Performed by the Trans Siberian Orchestra, its lyrics kept me going forward during several years of dark holidays when we felt we would never bring home Petya’s friend Pasha. Ensconsed behind the high walls of a Dickensian institution, Russian officials felt he was unadoptable, an invalid-idiot to be relegated to the margins of mania. We saw none of their diagnoses and kept believing for our own Christmas miracle and homecoming of a child in which others could not believe. For four long years, we fought for the impossible, the Divine “Da” overruling the Russian bureucratic “Nyet”. The past would be forgiven, the future be rewritten.

It is my prayer for you today: believe, and open your life to the realm of all things being possible!

Here are the words to “Anno Domine”:

“On this night of hope and salvation
One child lies embraced in a dream
Where each man regardless of station
On this night can now be redeemed

Where every man regardless of his nation
Ancestral relations
On this night the past can fly away

And that dream we’ve dreamed most
That every child is held close
On this night that dream won’t be betrayed

All as one
Raise your voices!
Raise your voices!
All as one
On this Christmas day!

All rejoice
Raise your voices!
Raise your voices!
All rejoice
Anno Domine!

On this night when no child’s forgotten
No dream sleeps where He cannot see
No man here is misbegotten
And this night’s dreams are still yet to be

Where every man regardless of his nation
Ancestral relations
On this night the past can fly away

And that dream we’ve dreamed most
That every child is held close
On this night that dream won’t be betrayed

All as one
Raise your voices!
Raise your voices!
All as one
On this Christmas day!

All rejoice
Raise your voices!
Raise your voices!
All rejoice
Anno Domine!” Play Song Here: 06-anno-domine

As Yom Kippor begins at sunset, our family is seated in the congregation. We are as diverse as the day is long, but united in our belief that God sees and cares.

Our family is Jewish with Christian beliefs, or Christian with Jewish roots. Take your pick. To some, one label means more than the other. Suffice it to say, we are similar to those early First Century believers.

As I look across our family, I recognize that each of us has been “saved”, both in the traditional, spiritual sense of being born-again by faith, but also in the physical sense, being rescued by God from certain demise. Let me explain.

My own family fled Russia in the days following the Bolshevik Revolution. The Red Army, then the White Army, then the Red Army swept through my grandmother’s city. She and her sister would sneak by the long pier jutting into the sea and try to figure out the identities of the latest war casualties, their feet weighted by rocks, and their hair undulating like seaweed below the surface.

Babushka was the only one who made it out alive, being put on the last British ship leaving Russia, the others too proud to board. She got as far as Constantinople where she languished for two years with fevers and sores, finally awakening to find her head shaved and her body wasted away. She was still a teen, a nurse by profession.

Through an aid society, she again grabbed the last boat bound for America. Outside of New York, the boat drove in circles, unable to come ashore. The Russian quota of immigrants had been filled. At last, the President passed an Executive Order allowing entrance for this one boat. My grandmother had been saved.

But she lived the rest of her life as an agnostic, traumatized by being ripped from her gentrified family lifestyle, close to the Tsar’s inner circle, but far from a loving God. In her mind, survival and success came from pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, which is what she did during her new life in a new land.

The other side of the family also came to America after the Russian Revolution. My grandfather was awed by the stories told by the Jewish tailor who had returned to their small shtetl, relating dollar-a-day wages and other streets-paved-with-gold stories. They had found the Promised Land and my grandfather traveled soon thereafter with him, marrying a good Yiddish-speaking girl once in America.

The couple and their burgeoning family were wooed back to the newly-formed Soviet Union by Communist propagandists working in America. At the border, their American passports were seized, along with any US Dollars they were carrying.

“Tovarishchee,” said the guards, “we have a new system where money is not used. All is done by barter, so you will not be needing this.”

And thus, this side of the family became stranded in Mother Russia as years of Civil War stretched into long days of death and darkness.

But my Russian family had praying neighbors, not-so-secret believers, the kind that would believe and pray, fast and pray, lifting up their voices until not only heaven, but hell heard them. It was late during one of these all-night prayer sessions that the neighbors had a vision of our family. The next day, they stepped forward.

“God told us to give you this,” they said, pressing long-hidden and even longer-saved funds into my grandfather’s hands. “With this, you will travel to America and serve the Living God. One day, He will use you mightily.”

Now, mind you, my grandparents were not born-again believers at all. But one night of a neighbor’s prayer made all the difference. Mother, father, and two young schoolboys who had already been born to them bowed heir heads, tears streaming down each face, lifting their hands to their new Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Their spiritual and physical freedom had been purchased for them, paid in full.

Those young boys grew into young men, producing Russian radio Bible broadcasts, beamed into the homeland during decade after decade of crushing Communistic persecution. Our family had been saved, not by our own bootstraps, but by Divine intervention.

Benedetto’s family history is every bit as fascinating and I’ll have to save that for my one-day, some-day book. He came to faith in Yeshua (Jesus) as the Jewish Messiah while living and working as an archaeologist in Israel. Too sarcastic and scientific in his thought processes to accept any such “mental crutch”, he changed his mind when confronted with modern-day miracles. Try as he might, he could not disprove the power of faith, plus the fact that Yeshua fulfilled more than 320 Messianic prophecies spoken centuries before, detailing where He would be born, how He would live, what He would accomplish, opposition that He would face, etc.

The prophecies were a statistical improbability with so many zeroes after it that mathematicians gave up trying to quantify the odds long ago.

Fast-forward to many years later. Benedetto was diagnosed with a very serious and advanced cancer, odd for someone in good shape, who ate healthy foods, and did all the right things. He rapidly dropped a lot of weight over a two-month time period, arriving to surgery emaciated, and emerging even worse.

The doctors gave him a grim prognosis. They said he would be flat on his back for five to six months, if survive at all. The cancer had spread to other organs.

We did the only thing that we knew to do: we prayed, knowing that we had a Redeemer, a Deliverer, a Messiah who loved us. Three days later, the doctors with befuddled looks entered his hospital room.

“There’s been a remarkable turn of events…” one started.

“This is a real head-scratcher,” reported another.

The cancer had literally disappeared. All of the tested tissue samples where there had once been cancer cells raging, came back clear. My husband was cancer-free, healed, and delivered.

Through the years, the Day of Atonement has become quite meaningful for us. It’s not only a day of fasting, repentance, and considering our ways, it’s also a day of confidence and gratefulness. We know in Whom we have believed.

There is a Redeemer, Jesus, God’s own Son. With Him, the sun shines brightly, even on the darkest of days.

I will share more of our faith in an upcoming blog, how it has affected our children adopted from Russia in some most unusual, as well as humorous ways.

L’shanah tovah tikatevu (May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year)!

Russian forests evoke many images and emotions. Featured prominently in Russian literature, they are both tangled and tame. Some sport manicured pathways and fountains, while other corners shade wildflowers and weeds, picturesque in their ability to fill an empty patch.

I go there to escape the heat of the scorching summer sun. Peace and quiet reign in the forest of my first choice, close to a cathedral under renovation. I am undisturbed by petitioners or picnicers alike.

But it is early in the morning when most revelers and ramblers are still asleep. At the stroke of ten, the swelling sound of an orchestra fills the forest for all of ten or fifteen seconds. I pause, only to discover that it stops, almost before it begins. A war memorial marking the hour. The birds surrounding me continue their calls and songs, trickling fountains babble, again enshrouding the forest in deep, hushed mystery.

I visit another forest close to the center of symbolic Starii Krai. This family fun park beckons those children who wish to rent a small, pedal-powered car—whether a VW bug, a military jeep, a sleek sportscar, or any of a dozen different selections—10 minutes for 50 rubles (almost $2). Closeby, a young boy sails his remote-controlled sailboat on a placid pool, while families watch turtles and geese sunning themselves on the banks. There’s a kiddie carousel, and a trampoline, and swings, and a slide. Disneyland it’s not, but the typically Russian flavor of it all, with old-fashioned cotton candy and plastic pinwheel vendors dotting the landscape encourage me to bring the girls here. They will not find another experience like it outside of Russia.

Just a few months ago, my wintertime flight from this region to Moscow was diverted. Heavy snowstorms closed all of the Moscow airports. We ended up landing in Nizhny Novgorod and as we circled, I spotted cross-country skiers silently speeding through the forests below.

Historically, forests hold secrets. I wonder what the forest knows about me. I am not here to pick mushrooms, nor to picnic, nor to find Baba Yaga’s hut. Instead, I seek a quiet place where I may collect my thoughts and gather strength for the days ahead.

Once every seven days, our body, mind, and spirit need to unplug. This recharging of the batteries and reconnecting with our spiritual side was deemed to be so important that it ranked right up there as one of the Big Ten.

We were to honor and respect one day in order to keep it holy.

Holy, set apart, different from the mundane. Not mentioned very much these days.

The world at large tends to become uncomfortable when faced with the sacred. They prefer the secular. Hence the move toward frenetic activity every day of the week.

Pass by any sports field at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday or Sunday and you will find adults sacrificing their children, who should be in synagogue or church, on the altar of Fun. If not sports, it will be on-demand birthday parties, play dates, or shopping excursions. We have lost sight of the holy. Those who honor their Creator are considered the fanatics, the ones outside the pale of popular culture.

Adults face similar challenges. For many, politics, yardwork, the fat Sunday newspaper and a croissant have become their religion. This is the day for a long, leisurely bikeride, a picnic in the park, a champagne brunch, or a football and chili get-together. God has been deleted out of the Daytimer, scratched from the schedule, cancelled from the calendar.

But it’s all a matter of choice, of priorities. Even the most Important News Programs (that happen to fall on Sunday mornings for some odd and sinister reason) can be recorded with TiVo.

Our family is fighting back. We are keeping it holy, not with horse and buggy, but with hearts and minds looking above. We are flying against the prevailing winds, and as any pilot knows, that’s the only way to get any lift.

Petya takes golf lessons on Wednesdays and has homework assignments each week. This time, he had to write his golfing goals in ascending order, the easiest being number one on the bottom, the more difficult being number five on the top.

Suprisingly, the hardest goals were the easiest to list. These were issues he tried to remember and implement each week. When he got down to number one, he paused to consider what could be so simple and so foundational as to be momentarily forgotten. There at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, he laughed aloud when he discovered it.

“Aim towards the hole!” he shouted.

“There you go.”

Putting pencil to his goalbook, he shortened the phrase to “Aim toward hole.”

When I checked the several pages of homework to make sure they were neat and fully completed, my eyes were drawn to this step so fundamental, and so simple, as to elude most.

It read, “Aim toward holy.”

I discussed the significance of his slip in spelling. Here was a child who was more familiar with “holy” than with “hole”.

On the goal ladder of life, right at the bottom, stands the foundation. There is no step lower that will ever take us higher.