There are some testimonies that arrive as one dramatic miracle.
Irina’s was unfolding differently. She was noticing the change little by little—in her thoughts, in her words, in the peace she was carrying. And now her family was noticing too. The fear and anxiety that had followed her for so long were quieter. Even the way she spoke was different. Irina comes from a military family, where rough language had always been a normal part of life, and she told us quite openly that she had simply stopped using it. No one had told her to. She hadn’t set out to clean up her vocabulary or prove that she had changed. It was just happening. And the people who knew her best could hear it.
It had begun in Jaffa, when Irina prayed with our team and opened her heart to Yeshua.
Not long afterward, she joined us again, this time with a group of olim—Jewish families newly arrived in Israel—for a day in Jerusalem. Somewhere along the road, as she began telling us what had happened since that prayer, she put it into words herself: “I feel as if I’ve been born again.” There was something wonderfully simple about the way she said it. She wasn’t trying to give us a testimony. She was trying to explain what was happening to her.
That sense of discovery followed her into Jerusalem. Irina had come wanting to take prayer notes to the Western Wall, but when we entered the prayer garden at Christ Church, she didn’t want to leave. We talked about what Yeshua taught about prayer and worship—that we can come before God wherever we are—and after listening for a moment she said, “Then let’s pray here.” We stood together, held hands and prayed in the name of Yeshua for a healing need that was on her heart. When we finished, Irina said simply, “My heart is filled with peace.”
Anya and her young son, Nikolai, were with us that day too.
Their family had arrived in Israel only two weeks earlier, and Anya is raising three children on her own. Only the Lord knows everything they walked through before arriving here. They had heard about the Western Wall, of course, but when Anya and Nikolai finally stood before it themselves, Anya began to cry. Then Nikolai did too. Later they told us, almost with surprise, “Now we understand why they call it the Wailing Wall.” Two weeks in Israel. A mother raising three children alone. Her son standing beside her. Everything familiar left behind, so much still uncertain ahead of them—and now Jerusalem was in front of them, no longer a place they had heard about from somewhere else. They were here.
As the day went on, something else began happening around these families. Believers in Jerusalem opened their doors to them. They listened to their stories, helped them, prayed with them, and explained why, although they themselves were not Jewish, they loved the people of Israel and wanted to stand with them. Our group was deeply touched by the love with which they were received. These families were carrying the enormous practical reality of beginning life again in Israel, and here were people they had never met making room for them. By evening, they were with us at our Jerusalem congregation, surrounded once again by people praying with them, talking with them and welcoming them in.
On the drive home, everyone was exhausted.
Then Irina suddenly announced, “That’s it. Now I want to take a day off and come with you to Jerusalem.” We laughed. That morning, on the way to Jerusalem, she had told us about the fear and anxiety she used to carry and the changes her own family had begun to notice. “I feel as if I’ve been born again,” she had said. Now, on the way home, she was already asking when she could come back.
This is one of the beautiful things about serving olim—Jewish people who have newly returned to Israel. We meet them at an extraordinary moment in their lives. They have come home to a land their people prayed toward for generations, often carrying far more with them than what we can see in their suitcases. We may be there to help with practical needs, make introductions and walk beside them through those bewildering first weeks. And then, in the middle of an ordinary conversation on the road, a woman who prayed with us in Jaffa only a short time ago says, “I feel as if I’ve been born again.”
And suddenly another homecoming is taking place.
This is why the call to “comfort My people” still matters. Your prayers, acts of generosity and every hand extended in love helps us answer it together—so that families arriving in Israel are not only welcomed home, but surrounded by people who will walk beside them.
“Comfort, comfort My people,” says your God.
Isaiah 40:1
