336-Carol Holesak: A Jewish Girl From Brighton Beach Who Met the Messiah

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Get Carol's book, Jesus Jesus Jesus: The Life Journey of a Jewish Girl Who Came To Know Jesus The Messiah by 

Reach her at her website by clicking here.

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A listener note before you press play. This conversation includes the loss of children, domestic violence, and a mental health crisis.

Some stories are not for scrolling past. This one belongs to Carol.

She grew up Jewish in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and says she thought the whole world was Jewish. She barely got out of high school. What she loved was walking that boardwalk all the way to Coney Island for Nathan's hot dogs.

She married at nineteen. By twenty four she had three sons, and two of them had died. Her mother died at forty four.

She told her husband she was leaving. She could not stay in a place where people asked who was watching the baby.

What followed was years of hard road. Ocala. A wedding on a ranch set for the seventh of July at seven o'clock that she called off when the man started beating her. Beauty school, because she says a woman needs to be able to take care of herself. Fort Lauderdale, then Miami, where she went looking for the most expensive haircut in town and talked her way into the salon behind it.

She is honest that she was stoned most of that time.

Then Christmas 1978. A client handed her a Bible and told her to read the book of John.

She was going to throw it away.

She sat down instead. When she read that Jesus and His disciples were Jewish like her, something opened. She loved Passover. She had grandparents from Europe. This was not foreign. Then she read that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.

Almost forty years later she is still telling that story.

There is a chapter in her book called My Nervous Breakdown. She had been a Christian for years, studying the Word, when she and her husband were out walking on Shelter Island in San Diego and he turned around to find her curled up in the grass. She says the hard season handed her a master's degree in human life without ever going to school for it.

Out of that came Changing Point, then a one day seminar, then a six week journey toward healing, then a nonprofit ministry that traveled for years. Three years ago she says God told her to get the workbook out of the closet and do it again, under a new name. A Deep Change. She does not charge for it.

She also runs Second Saturday Sisters, which started in her clubhouse ten years ago because she has a sound sensitivity that kept her out of church. When COVID scattered everyone, a friend suggested Zoom. It has been meeting there ever since.

Her book is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus: The Life Journey of a Jewish Girl Who Came to Know Jesus the Messiah. Her second book is in progress, and she announces the title in this episode for the first time anywhere. Back to Brooklyn, Born Again.

She has a line she offers in Spanish, and it is the only Spanish she knows. Siempre hay esperanza en Jesús. There is always hope.

Find Carol on Facebook, on Instagram at lovejoyhope3, and at frommyheart-2yours.org.

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