At the age of five I was starting to have trouble seeing. Learning to read became difficult. Several eye doctors actually blamed this problem on me acting out because I was jealous of the impending birth of my sister. Eventually an uncle suggested I be taken to see a neurologist. He discovered immediately that there was something very wrong.

I was admitted to the New York Medical Center with a diagnosis of brain cancer. However, Dr. Bronson Ray did not believe this was the correct diagnosis and decided, with my parents permission, to perform an exploratory operation. As the story goes, I asked to speak to the doctor before the anesthesia took effect. I told him not to worry, that God would be guiding his hand. My parents said Dr. Ray told them he cried when I said those words.

Christmas was strange for me as I had never been exposed to the true meaning of it. In my school, there was a Christmas program every year and my parents allowed me to sing carols as long as I didn’t say the words “Christ the Lord”.

I came home on weekends and, starting at about age ten, received instruction at Hebrew school once a week as I prepared for my bar mitzvah. I was bar mitzvah’ed in the Jewish tradition at age 13. Part of the bar mitzvah responsibility requires reading a section of the Torah in front of those gathered.  Because I could not see the Torah, it was necessary for me to memorize all the passages. The seriousness of this ceremony made me realize that I wanted to have a closer relationship with God, but I didn't know how to go about it and didn’t feel that I had anyone to show me the way.
 

At age 14, I began to rebel. I was just a lost teenager in the Bronx. I started down a path to destroy my life. Anything goes: alcohol, all kinds of drugs, risky behavior and total disrespect of my parents and myself. Fortunately I never spent a night in jail. Several times I did not come home at night and left my parents wondering where I was. As a parent now, I can only imagine what they were going through. Somehow, through all of this, I maintained very good grades in school.

And then came college. It must have been a night in December 1973. I was 19 years old and tripping on LSD. My roommate called the crisis center on campus at SUNY Binghamton, New York. The two crisis counselors who responded happened to be members of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. I did not know it at the time but both Ginny and Dave were praying before they came up to my dorm room because they had never witnessed to a person who was tripping on acid. When I opened the door the first words out of my mouth were, “Is there a God and does He forgive me?” Just as I had opened the door to Ginny and Dave, my words to them opened the door for them to witness to me about Jesus. They stayed with me throughout the night.

For the first time in my life I heard the story of the Savior who was born for the Jews first. They showed me the many prophecies from the Old Testament that Jesus fulfilled. I started going to prayer meetings and learned first hand about Christian love. The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship group on campus answered my questions. Since they knew I was legally blind and could not easily read the printed word, they bought me a Braille New Testament. For the first time in my life I read the word for myself.
 

The Lord spoke to me through His word starting with the Gospel of John. I worried about what becoming a Christian would mean for my Jewishness and what my family and friends would say. But the Lord wants us to entrust our problems to Him. This became the first burden I would give to the Lord. On January 27, 1974 in a dorm room in Binghamton, New York, I accepted Christ into my life. It was my “rebirthday.” Salvation and eternity became my spiritual destiny.

My use of drugs stopped immediately and although I lost my taste for alcohol, I gave that up more slowly. Nevertheless, I was a new person in Christ with a new purpose in my life. My change of lifestyle was dramatic. My parents called me gullible, but through God’s word I knew that Jesus was Lord and that he had fulfilled the prophecies from the Old Testament and that He had died and rose from the dead for me.

I cannot express how much the Lord has blessed me with a beautiful wife and daughter and a solid church family.  Old friends from my previous life cannot believe how Jesus has transformed me. How a disrespectful, drug using, self-destructive, blind Jew from the Bronx could change his life so dramatically. This is a true miracle.