Rob Berman
I was born a Jew, but was not raised Jewish. My dad is a messianic Jew, and my mom is not Jewish. I very clearly remember at the age of five asking the Lord to forgive my sins and accepting the grace that He offers through Jesus Christ on the Cross.
Just before my sixth birthday, we were on our way to a family braai and as we stopped outside the gate, 12 armed men surrounded our car and hijacked us. By the grace of God, they did not harm us physically, but they took our valuables and left us extremely traumatised. I was old enough to understand exactly what was going on, but not old enough to adequately process the experience. The hijacking sparked a deep sense of fear and insecurity in me that would become my identity, continuously reinforced by the world around me.
Fast forward 18 years: I had just graduated from university and was pursuing my lifelong dream of crossing Africa by motorbike. I joined an organised tour and headed out from Cape Town wondering (like I so often did throughout my life): “Am I good enough to accomplish this?”
“I had to choose my identity in the Lord, and trust that He is completely sovereign.”
Along the way, the Lord taught me some profound lessons. One of them came as we headed into the Chalbi Desert in northern Kenya where over 500 kilometres of harsh desert climate and gravel roads lay ahead. After only eight kilometres, my shock absorber blew due to the harsh road and the heat. Without a functioning shock absorber, my bike became extremely difficult to ride. Although there was a spare shock available – and the tour organiser guaranteed us prior to leaving that he would personally replace any shock absorber that blew – he refused and told me to ride on to Ethiopia. This, along with a whole comedy of errors leading up to that point, left me furious and extremely disappointed.
By the time we reached camp that evening, I was in a foul mood. I got into my tent and tried to shut everyone out. I was raging against the world, looking for someone or something to blame for my plight and sadness. But in that moment, I felt the Lord distinctly say to me: “You got yourself into this – what are you going to do about it?”
Growing up, my dad regularly told me that “happiness is a choice”, but I never really believed him. I always believed that my sadness was a result of external factors and circumstances. But in that moment in the middle of the Desert, I knew that I had to choose to be happy. I had to choose my identity in the Lord, and to trust that He is completely sovereign. It was an easy choice to make. And with that, the world’s voice – the voice that had continuously been reinforcing in me an identity of fear and insecurity – dulled into complete silence, and the Lord’s voice spoke loud and clear: “You are My son and I choose you.” I knew this was the truth, because Jesus had died to make it so.
The Lord has used many moments and situations like this to remind and teach me that I am loved – deeply loved. That although I am a Christian Jew, and don’t quite fit in with either group because of it, the Lord has been teaching me that I belong, that I have a heritage, and that I have a future. But most of all, He has been teaching me that we have a Saviour who gave up Heaven to come to earth to suffer, bleed and to die, so that we might truly live.