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Ah, when I said the words "pay the price" he stopped. He twirled around toward me.
"Woman," he objected, "you shouldn't have said that. That was bad. Those are bad words -- 'pay
the price.' What do you mean -- 'pay the price'?"
"You have to be willing to pay the price, Rabbi. You'll have to be willing to give up those
precious children, even if they forget you forever. You'll have to be willing to give up your little
crippled mother whom you carried across the border from Hungary into Austria for safety when
the Communists swarmed there -- your little mother whom you carried over to your home in
America, the little mother who lives with you today -- you'll have to be willing for all that, if you
are going to have what Paul had. It will cost you everything."
"Don't try to blackmail me, woman! Don't blackmail me," he remonstrated. Then he turned
towards the pulpit, wringing his hands and crying out, "O God, I must have You. I must have this. I
must have this change. I must have this experience. I must be made a new man. But, O God, You
have to do it my way. God, You'll have to do it my way."
"No, Rabbi," I interrupted, "it will have to come His way. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the
Truth, and the Life: no man cometh to the Father, but by Me.' There's only one way, Rabbi. God
can break you as you would pick up a little stick and break it, and He will break you, Rabbi."
He never once told me this was not the truth.
"Rabbi," I accosted him again, "you know this is the truth now. You know this is the way.
How do you dare get up in front of your synagogue during the coming Day of Atonement and tell
your people that it's by good works and by gifts to charity and much praying and repenting that they
can have forgiveness of sin, that they can get a new heart, that they can be made right with God,
when now you know that it is only through the shed blood of God's Lamb, the virgin-born Son of
God, that we can be saved and born again? How dare you?"
"But," he said, "I can't pay the price! I can't! I won't!"
"You're willing to deny Jesus then, Rabbi? You're willing to stop short of receiving Him as
your Saviour and die and go to hell and drag your wife and mother and children with you?"
"Don't blackmail me!" he repeated. "You're trying to blackmail me again. Don't mention my
wife and children and mother to me. I love them."
At that he turned around. He and Jim walked out of the church. I could hear him muttering
as he left, "That woman! That woman! And she isn't even five feet tall!"
But it was not "that woman" that pierced his heart; it was not "that woman" that made him
feel naked before God.
Somehow his congregation must have "gotten wind" of it. Eventually he was asked to leave
the synagogue. He left that city, moved to another area where he became the rabbi of another
synagogue, and from that city in a northern state I began getting church bulletins anonymously. Later