This week, our President and Global CEO Yael Eckstein and U.S. Board Chair Bishop Paul Lanier hosted a special Fellowship Family Meeting. More than 1,000 Fellowship friends and supporters joined the call as Yael and Bishop Lanier shared the latest on Israel’s peace deal and the freed hostages. Yael also talked about the road ahead for Israel and The Fellowship and what these two years of unprecedented war and terror taught her about faith, friends, and support.
“What’s it like to breathe in Israel today?” Bishop Lanier asked Yael.
“What it’s like to go out now, Bishop Lanier, and be able to breathe is that I’m not doing it alone,” Yael said. “That I know I’m taking this big exhale with all of you, and I know that with the relief I’m feeling and the determination that this is not over. I know that this is not the end. I know that we’re all standing in this together. Just as it says in the Scriptures, ‘I’m with you in your despair.’ I’ve felt you, Bishop Lainer, and everyone on this call with me and my four children, my husband, and the children of Israel as we’ve been through two years of near despair and desperate, desperate fear and hard times. But in these happy, glorious times that we’re seeing, our own sort of redemption.”
Grateful for this current peace, Yael eagerly awaits the postwar renewal of Israel. “We’re determined to make sure we’re not losing this generation [of Israelis],” she told Bishop Lanier. “We’re going to tell them, ‘You can do more than anyone is able to do ever after what you’ve seen and what you’ve given. We’re going to make this country stronger than ever, but it starts now with one block after another.”
Plans for postwar renewal and healing in Israel from The Fellowship include food for those returning home and rebuilding their lives, bomb shelters for hospitals and schools, meals for the mourning periods of former hostages’ families, and new kindergartens to replace the ones that were burned down by Hamas terrorists two years ago. Bishop Lanier also asked Yael how The Fellowship’s Christian friends and supporters can continue to help.
“It’s prayer and it’s action,” she said. “But it comes on the back of something that cannot be lost –and that is knowing scripture. If we are biblically illiterate as Jews and Christians, we are going to be chasing our tails. We’re going to be swayed by what anyone thinks, wants, the evil in their hearts that they’re going to clothe with what they call God’s word. If we don’t really know what God’s word really is, we will eat it up and accept the lies as truth.”
Yael also remembered what a released hostage said about his time in captivity—his faith was made stronger by the horrors he faced. At a time when those like Hamas choose darkness and death, we can learn to choose light and call for life. The Fellowship‘s supporters all agreed that we choose light and life and that, as Yael pointed out, the day we no longer believe peace is possible through God is the day there is no longer a channel for His blessings.
