Staff Testimonies
FFOZ, dedicated to proclaiming the Torah and its way of life, fully centered on Messiah, to today's people of God.
Amber Michael
Amber (Tikvah) is the editor of messiah magazine and the wife of Boaz Michael, president and founder of FFOZ.
I have very few significant memories from my childhood. But one of the most poignant was the death of my Mom’s best friend to cancer, leaving behind two young children. Maybe I remember this event because it was ground breaking for my parents’ journey toward HaShem. From the time of that tragedy onward, I remember going to church faithfully.
Another significant memory was the night I prayed to God for the first time in a very real and personal way. Although I was only nine years old, my commitment was very serious, even to the point of witnessing to my unsaved relatives and school teachers. I always liked the way it made me feel to share the Gospel, and I enjoyed reading the Scriptures even more.
My parents sent me to Christian schools beginning in seventh grade. I was very happy about this because several of my closest church friends went to Christian schools, and I always envied how much they knew about the Bible.
Our first youth group leader knew a lot about the Bible too. She was a smiley, short, spunky missionary on furlough from Venezuela. Her ability to learn and fluently speak a foreign language and share the gospel in a faraway place deeply intrigued me. She inspired me with her zeal to share God’s Word. Her energy was contagious, and she was real about giving it all up for God. This was attractive to me, and it challenged me to do the same with my life.
During these junior high years, a guest speaker and missionary came to our church. I listened intently, as his message moved me. It was so interesting to hear of things that people were doing for God around the world. He closed his message with a prayer and asked the Lord to confirm in the hearts of those who were to commit their lives to missions to do so. I raised my hand and committed before my whole church to serve God with my life and go wherever He would lead. That night was very meaningful and memorable for me.
I continued attending Christian high school and, as I had hoped, learned a lot about the Bible, and committed many passages to memory. I met my husband, Boaz, during these years of discovering God and His Scriptures.
Interestingly enough—but not surprisingly to any of you—my husband was also very zealous about preaching to everyone about how much they needed God and His Spirit in their lives. As passionate as we were for the message, we often fought between ourselves about whose doctrines were more accurate. Imagine that: two kids, determined to share our spiritual convictions with the world and convince others to follow God exactly as we did…but we didn’t agree on the particulars of that lifestyle.
High school brought frustration and weariness because we began to recognize that spiritual games were being being played by most of our friends and some of our teachers. People spoke of their spiritual lives, but they lived completely opposite that. Everyone seemed to know—but nobody said anything.
Most “good Christian” kids knew exactly what to say and how to put on a show. But when no one was watching, they’d often aspire to go as far as they could in sin without getting caught. They’d mock what their parents thought they were doing. Whether the parents realized it or not, their own hypocrisy of telling kids to “do what the Bible says” while ignoring large, obvious parts of it, resulted in deeply disillusioned kids. Sadly, we were part of this charade and entered our own phase of rebellion, too.
Thankfully, Torah study brought us out of this rebellion. My husband’s parents started getting into this “Jewish thing” and, of course, Boaz began telling everyone that they should keep a Passover Seder. This didn’t really go over too well in our Christian high school. After all, our teachers had just spent the last seven years teaching us how free we were from the Law! I was smitten and deeply in love with Boaz by this time, so I listened and promptly agreed with everything he told me. This led to many debates at home, and my relationship with my parents started to get rocky.
As soon as we graduated, we got married. We attended the same messianic congregation as my in-laws, even though it was a 2-hour drive each way. Looking back, I miss those long Shabbats. Our congregation spent the day together, from 10AM to 10PM. As I became more involved in people’s lives there, I observed spiritually-minded people doing spiritual things. This appealed to me.
As a newlywed I soon realized that I needed to believe this lifestyle for myself rather than just blindly following out of my love for Boaz. I listened intently and learned so much at our new congregation, which solidified the things he had been telling me, and I began to own my understanding of Torah. We learned so much and dialogued together and the more we learned about what the Scriptures said, the more God’s Word made sense to me. We had entered into a new level of actually trying to do all of what the Bible said, as opposed to just talking about it.
We had our first two children soon after marriage, and began First Fruits of Zion when our second born was 5 month old; it was a tithe to our congregation in the form of a monthly newspaper. It was very fulfilling to share what we were learning and to use the creative venue of the paper. By the time our fifth edition was printed, people from the surrounding states were calling in and asking to be put on the subscription list. The only problem was that there wasn’t one. When our monthly expenses began to exceed $800 a month, we figured that starting a formal subscription process was a good idea.
Our office was in our home, and we worked mostly after the little ones went to bed each night. We regularly worked late into the night, and I often stuffed envelopes, printed labels, sorted outgoing mail and answered the phone most of the day. Before we knew it, the paper led to a supplementary discipleship study program, the Torah Club.
It was fall time when I remember the Spirit of God direct me in a way that I have only felt a few times in my life. One day while folding laundry, I felt assured that this child (our third baby) would be born in Israel; somehow I felt impressed that we would be in the Land by my ninth month of pregnancy. This was a shock because I was only 6 months from delivery. That same night we attended a Jonathan Settel concert and received the confirmation.
Jonathan—who lived in Israel at that time—questioned how he could minister to others about Jerusalem without living there. Something clicked in both my husband’s and my hearts. Weren’t we doing the same thing? We were teaching people about the Land, the people and the Scriptures of Israel and espousing a Torah-observant lifestyle from Denver, Colorado. How crazy was that?
So, we prayed and expressed our willingness to move, estimated the costs required, and asked HaShem to get us there if that was His will. The miracles of the next few months made it explicitly clear that we were going. In fact, we felt as though He was baring us upon His wings straight to the Land of Promise. Life was a dream, and God was close to us.
Until…the night before we were supposed to leave, when our three-year-old son went into grand mal seizures. I have never been so afraid. His little body seized for over five hours, and the doctors could not stop the cycle without stopping his heart. We wept as we signed the waiver form, and I thought Boaz was going to collapse. He ran outside and told God that if this was the test, we would fail. We could not agree to losing our son for His mission. But somehow during that time God’s strength in our life surpassed our own weakness, and we committed to trust Him no matter what.
The next week was spent in intensive care and in the hospital. A social worker met with us to prepare us for life with a child who wouldn’t speak, walk or be normal again. We could not accept this; we asked God to heal our son. We believed He would, even though it was not evident immediately. We were determined not to allow this to stop us from moving to Israel, so we left a month later. We arrived in Jerusalem, and our third baby was born in the Land exactly a month later, just as I had been promised.
We lived with my in-laws for the first year and a half, and I spent most of my time as a new immigrant driving our son to physical and speech therapy. He was restored to complete health and wholeness within the first year of living in Jerusalem. We credit the sovereign, healing hand of the Most High God of the Universe for this miracle.
We adjusted to life in Israel better than we expected. I missed my parents and prayed that the Lord would show them His ways and that they could somehow understand our choices. He did! During our first few years there, my parents went through a drastic transformation—so much so that they began helping in our FFOZ office.
Soon we had our own home, our kids were going to religious schools in Israel, I was regularly attending Hebrew language school, and we were living a dream. We loved it there. Our lives were full, happy and deeply contented. We had another baby but miscarried our fifth a year and a half later. Even hard times like that weren’t as devastating as they could have been because we were surrounded by a very close community, and we viewed our lives as a sacrifice for the Lord.
In Israel, we finally felt like we belonged. At last all the people around us didn’t need to be convinced of the relevance of Torah in their lives. We found a place where Torah lifestyle was convenient, automatic and encouraged. And because of our shared value in the importance of Torah, we were never persecuted for our beliefs in Yeshua, which we were comfortable being open about and discussing with others.
FFOZ was growing by leaps and bounds during this time, and we could hardly keep up with the demands of producing new materials. We traveled to the U.S. every summer for seminar and conference touring, and we soon realized that there were many co-laborers who were also eager to share the message of Torah with their friends and loved ones. It was upon this realization that HaYesod was birthed.
We were excited about HaYesod and were moving full-force ahead when we were hit again with another trial that led us to return to the States to regroup and focus on completing the production of this FFOZ resource. Since recording HaYesod took much more time than we anticipated, we remained in the States—unintentionally—that whole year, and even until today.
As hard as congregational life had become for us in Israel, we missed it. During our first year back, we lived in Colorado and found ourselves in need of community, friends and others to share Torah life with. We traveled that year and found a Torah study in Phoenix that caught our attention. Boaz was asked to speak there three times in the spring of 2000, and by that summer we had decided to move. Phoenix was warm and reminded us of Israel. It seemed to provide the loving community for which we yearned.
We also recognized the need to create materials for so many that we had met along the way who wanted to start Torah communities in their own states. Since we’ve always gained our education through the school of hard knocks (life), we decided to start a community in order to help others along who aspired to do the same. We had no idea what we were in for.
We spent the following six-and-a-half years in Phoenix. Our attempt to build a Torah community sometimes felt successful and sometimes felt impossible. Whenever real people live real lives in the real Diaspora, Torah lifestyles take on a deeper level of difficulty. Life in a foreign land outside of Israel was much more challenging than community life in Israel, but our life is a mission, and we endeavored to move ahead despite tests, trials and hard times.
Our typical summers of travel became longer and more demanding. Finally, a friend loaned us his motorhome for our 2006 summer travel. We were quickly hooked! We realized that it was much more feasible to travel for long periods of time with growing kids in such a vehicle.
While on the road that summer, we felt lead to make the commitment to “Road Life” for a year. There were so many groups of Torah-minded people all over the U.S. who need encouragement, teaching and connection that the decision came more out of necessity than anything else.
Our year on the road was a delight—of course there were hard times too—and we greatly enjoyed the times of fellowship and friendship building that were accomplished along the way. We were able to witness the state of this movement firsthand and, without a doubt, we learned more than we taught.
Boaz was impressed with many new ideas, projects and books that need to be produced to meet the growing needs of Torah and Yeshua believing communities. So, we decided that it was time to plant again in a more permanent way.
With the growing cost of FFOZ offices in Denver, and our desire for a simpler life with lasting generational hopes, we felt it important to relocate. There are more details and confirmations from the Lord to share than this testimony space can hold, but without a doubt, we—and our FFOZ staff—became convinced that moving to mid-America was the right plan.
So, some things never change. We may be off the road temporarily, but we still stay up late at night after the kids are in bed. We still give most of our extra time and energy to FFOZ and creating resources for the greater body of Messiah. We will still travel and share the Torah with anyone who will listen. And we are still committed to honoring HaShem through meeting with Him at His appointed times with His people.
I am always asked whether or not we’ll return to Israel. Well, I guess that’s up to our Creator. He knows our lives, our futures and the plans that He has for us. We would love to return to the Land, should He call us there again. But for now, we are resolute to be content where He has planted us. We will serve Him from whatever land He so desires. We are right where we are supposed to be, as long as we know that we are in His will.
Torah life may be hard at times, but it is good, it is fulfilling and it is a blessing. Boaz and I continue to grow as individuals, as a family, in the greater FFOZ community and in this ministry. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has awesome things for His people; I am grateful to live in such a time as this.
Boaz and Amber (Tikvah) Michael live in Missouri with their home-school children Jeremiah (17), Shayna (15), Bekah (13) and Noah (11).
