Gittel Fruma came to believe in Jesus after growing up as an Orthodox Jew. Gittel lives with her husband and son in Clearwater, Florida. She is currently working on a book about her testimony and recording her first album. You can find her at her website GittelFruma.com or on Facebook at @GittelFrumaMusic.
W H AT T H E H E A RT S O F M E R E P L AY E R S H O L D by Gittel Fruma I remember the first time I learned about The Scream painted by Edvard Munch. I wonder what he would think to know it’s been immortalized in the form of a commonly used emoticon. Ironic that this famous statement on existential angst has now been so trivialized that it sits in each of our cell phones next to a smiling cat and a winky face. Do we really think so little of our own existence, our own search for meaning, that we can put it aside so easily? I’ve lived with existential angst my entire life, although for a long time I didn’t know what to call it. As a child attending an orthodox Jewish school, I learned that when Messiah came, we would live forever. Everything would be changed, and the world would be right again. We used to talk and sing endlessly about Messiah’s coming. It was everything. Being a child of both Judaism and science fiction, I was just as familiar with Star Trek as I was with Jewish doctrine. I would watch, awestricken, as mankind would journey throughout infinite space. Their encounters with the unknown both mystified and terrified me. And at night, I would lie in my bed and ponder things I did not and could not understand. If Messiah came, we would live forever. We would eventually travel through space, which is infinite. We would live in a world of time and space without end. The vastness of this notion was paralyzing. I’ve never quite been able to shake that feeling. When I came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah I had waited my whole life for, I read my Bible voraciously. One day, I came across a verse that made all the others make sense.
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