When Alyona boarded her flight to Israel, one word settled unexpectedly in her heart: love. She didn’t know why. People had warned her not to come. They told her Israel was frightening, that life here was difficult, that perhaps this was not the time to visit. But Alyona felt something entirely different.
Somewhere inside, she believed that something good was waiting for her here.
What she could not have known was that her parents were waiting with a story of their own. Valeri and Tamara had arrived in Israel only three months earlier, beginning a new life in a country that was still becoming home. Since arriving, something even deeper had happened: through our congregation, they had opened their hearts to Yeshua and begun walking with Him. When their daughter came to Israel for the first time, they asked if she could join us for one of our days in Jerusalem.
Our team spent the day with the family in the Old City, showing Alyona the places around her while sharing what the Bible says about Jerusalem. The conversations unfolded naturally as we walked, until eventually we found ourselves standing together on Mount Zion. There we began speaking about grace—about the grace of God revealed through His Son and how, from Jerusalem, the message of that grace went out to the nations.
One of our team members shared personally about experiencing that grace in his own life, and then we opened Isaiah 53 together. As Alyona listened, tears began filling her eyes. This was no longer simply a visit to a biblical place or a lesson about its history. Something was becoming deeply personal.
We asked Alyona whether she wanted to pray and open her heart to Yeshua. She said yes. And then she told us something we had not known: before she ever arrived in Israel, before our walk through Jerusalem, before Mount Zion and Isaiah 53, she had boarded the airplane with that single word in her heart—love.
We joined hands and prayed together.
Alyona wept. Valeri and Tamara wept. They embraced one another, and in the middle of that beautiful moment Alyona thanked her father for refusing to listen to those who had discouraged him from coming to Israel. People had tried to discourage her too, but she had believed that something good was waiting for her here.
And then she said something none of us expected:
“Now I understand that my home is here too. I will come back to live here.”
A Jewish couple had returned to Israel and begun a new life. Here, they encountered Yeshua. Now their daughter had come thousands of miles simply intending to visit them—and found herself standing in Jerusalem, hearing the words of Isaiah, opening her own heart to the Messiah of Israel and beginning to see Israel as home. During her visit, Alyona also joined us for two congregational gatherings, one in Jerusalem and another in Ashdod. What began as a family visit had become the beginning of faith, fellowship and belonging.
This is why we continue reaching people personally—walking with them, opening the Scriptures, sharing our own stories and making room for conversations that cannot be manufactured. We never know what God has already begun doing in someone’s heart long before our paths cross.
For Alyona, it began somewhere in the sky on the way to Israel with one unexpected word: love. By the time she left Jerusalem, that word had a face, a story—and a name: Yeshua.
