Soon after her salvation, Miriam abruptly vanished, leaving no trace of her whereabouts for over five years. The father of her child had become violent and threatening, so Miriam had scrapped her cell phone and fled with her boyfriend to the Negev in the South of Israel, where they opened a restaurant together.
Then one day, just as abruptly, she reemerged.
“I get a note on my desk, it says that Miriam’s back in Jerusalem and she wants to see you,” Shoshani said. “So I called her, and I said, ‘What’s up?’ And she said, ‘I want to grow in my faith.’”
Shoshani whipped together a weekly Bible study and discipleship group for Miriam and several other mothers. Each week, Miriam carried what she learned home to her boyfriend.
That’s when Miriam found out she was pregnant for a second time. And this time, it was a rare, high-risk pregnancy—twins who were mono-mono, or sharing the same placenta, with no membrane to keep their cords from tangling.
“So she finds out she’s pregnant, and the doctors are telling her to abort, I mean really telling her to abort, like ‘You’re going to have to abort or the babies are going to die. You can’t do this,’” Shoshani said.
The doctors’ alarm increased as they discovered one of the babies had a cleft lip—a possible sign of other handicaps. They urged Miriam to abort with escalated intensity.
“And she refused, because she was growing in her faith, and she refused to abort,” Shoshani said.
While her doctors were preoccupied with her crisis, Miriam was preoccupied with Yeshua. The Bible study had been steadily fueling her eagerness to know Him, and at this point she began insisting she needed to be baptized—she wanted to start a new page with Him, she told Shoshani.
“I was real sweet to her because I love her, but I was like, ‘let’s just wait,’” Shoshani said. “The reason for that was because she was living with her boyfriend.”
Shoshani and her husband, a local pastor, began meeting with the couple and counseling them to marry before Miriam and her boyfriend, who by now also wanted to be baptized, took this next step. They agreed, and Shoshani’s husband performed their wedding.
“And they said she was married with a giant belly,” Shoshani said.
Miriam was now eight months into her pregnancy—eight months of intensifying pressure from her doctors as they frantically warned her of the consequences of carrying to term. But Miriam saw her pregnancy in a different light.
“It’s make me want to come closer to Him,” she said in her video testimony created in preparation for her baptism. “Not because of the blessing that He giving me—because of the love that He’s showing me and the comfort. I can really take a breath without worried about anything. And to be happy, like, for real. Not to be looking for something else or,” she said, pausing for a moment before finishing simply—“…to have a deeply, honest happiness with Yeshua.”
Miriam lay in a hospital bed several weeks later being monitored during the last danger-fraught weeks leading up to the birth. Her doctors made the call at 36 weeks and commenced with a cesarean section. Imagine their surprise as they drew out two healthy baby boys! The one child’s cleft lip was so minor it didn’t even prevent him from nursing.
“And you know the doctors told her, ‘Oh look we did a great job,’” Shoshani recalled. “But she said, ‘No, God did this. God did this. God protected my sons.’”
* * *
Today Shoshani has the joy of seeing the family of five each week as they attend her husband’s congregation. The twins continue to thrive despite their early arrival, and Miriam’s oldest son, now 10 years old, is extremely warm, happy, and loving to everyone, she said.
“And he loves the Lord—he prays and everything,” she said.
Miriam is now in her mid-20s and remains happily married, her life bearing the marks of complete transformation.
“She’s grown up,” Shoshani said. “She’s calm; she’s not afraid anymore. She’s balanced.”
Shoshani sang the praises of this young mother she had come to love so much. She highlighted how along with the responsibility of juggling three children, Miriam still finds time for hospitality, often inviting their Bible study group to meet at her home.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone so relaxed with twins in my life,” she said. “All of the other young mothers in our congregation are saying about her, ‘We have one, and it’s hard, and she has two, and she makes it look easy.’ … It’s really something.”
Because Miriam’s husband suffers from debilitating back problems that prevent him from working, Be’ad Chaim has continued to help the family. Each month Miriam collects vouchers and six bags of diapers, and every three months she peruses Be’ad Chaim’s baby boutique for clothes, toys, and other supplies.
“She is so grateful,” Shoshani said. “She talks about it all the time.”
Reflecting back on Miriam’s life with the eyes of a seasoned pregnancy counselor, Shoshani concluded it all came back to hope—it always does.
“When she was 16 years old pretty much living in the streets, she had every reason in the world to abort, but because of the hope of Yeshua and her loving sisters, she chose life for the baby, and you know our counselors,” she said.
That single choice to keep her son sent her life snowballing in a positive direction, Shoshani said.
“I’ve seen many, many times that the children actually save our lives,” she said. “That child forced her to be a person of purpose, you know. And now the twins are born as a result.”
For her part, Miriam is overjoyed at her new life. Her words just before her baptism say it all:
“Right now I’m standing in a place where I wanted to be there for years,” she said. “I don’t want to be a slave to my sins. I just want to be a slave to the grace of God and the love that He’s given us. God love me because of His grace. Not because of me or my actions, or whether I will do that, or that, or I will dress this. Yeshua gave His life for us. What can we do to give Him back? It’s amazing.”
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This story was written by our guest author, Valerie Pors
