Welcome to our Crossing Over Africa blog! Part 1

The Journey of Darak and Zamaryah Batzalal

Shalom and welcome to our blog. We’re glad you’re here. We are Darak and Zamaryah. Some of you know us by our birth names Derek and Aprel. Over the past five years, our family has experienced a series of spiritual and personal transformations that have prompted us to embrace new names that are more aligned with our unique way of life. We took a deep dive into our spiritual faith and began to adjust our lives in ways that more closely reflect the Hebraic customs found in the Bible. By doing this, we’ve discovered there is so much more The Most High is calling our family to do. Creating this lifestyle blog to highlight and document the significant life changes our family is experiencing, is our way of sharing our story with you. Through our journey of discovery, we hope we can inspire and encourage your family to step outside its comfort zones and do something different. Something amazing! We invite you to join us as we explore our faith walk, start a family business, and take in all the things that make our family peculiar. Since this is our inaugural post, it’s only fitting that we take you back to the beginning where it all started. 

Our Background - A Midwest Love Story in the South

We were both born and raised in the Midwest, me from Ohio and Darak from Kentucky. We were raised in the same church organization but never knew each other until we were introduced in the summer of 2004. Interesting fact, we both come from very large families. How large? Darak is the oldest of seven children and I am the ninth of ten children. That’s just our immediate family. We have an even larger extended family which expands well into the hundreds in terms of aunts, uncles, and cousins. I say this for context. Our families were very close. My father and Darak’s grandfather were best friends. I actually spent summers hanging out with his cousins for many years. There were countless opportunities for our paths to cross and yet they never did, until that faithful summer in 2004. Even now I smile as I think about how perfect The Most High’s timing is. It was at a youth convention in 2003 that I first noticed Darak. The moment I saw him, I knew he would be my husband. In fact, I heard The Most High speak to me and say, “That’s your husband.”

Despite hearing this and trusting what I’d heard, it would be almost a year later before the two of us met. Once we did meet, there was an immediate connection. We began dating shortly after that. Six months later we were engaged and six months after that we were married. Fast forward to today, we’ve been married for 17 wonderful years. January 2024 will mark 18 years. We have three amazing children, a son and two daughters. We spent the first eight years of our marriage living in Chicago. In 2014 we moved to Atlanta and we’ve been living here ever since. The year we moved to Georgia was the same year we had our third child and the same year I became a stay-at-home mom after working for a book publishing company for nine years.  Our move down south was the result of a job offer Darak accepted for a major gaming studio. Thus Georgia became our home. As far as we were concerned, it was going to be our forever home. That is until the most magnificent reshaping began happening in our lives. 

A Personal Transformation - Reassessing Who We Are

In 2018 we began to take a serious audit of our lives. Up to that point, we had experienced multiple failed attempts to find a church home. It was rough. Having both grown up in the church, we understood the significance of having a strong faith walk and at that time, we equated having a strong faith walk with being part of a church community. That is, until The Most High stepped in and began to show us the path He had for us. To our surprise, it did not involve the church. Instead, He started us on a journey of self-reflection, and personal transformation through His Word.  Nothing was off limits. The first thing that was brought to our attention was our debt. The Most High made it clear to us that we should not be in debt. “Owe no man anything, but to love…”

That set us on a path to pay off our debt as soon as possible. Instead of living beyond our means, we began to live well below our means. We moved from a four-bedroom single-family house, into a small two-bedroom townhouse which cut our housing expenses in half. We set a strict budget. We sold as much as we could and we stopped using our credit cards. We both started driving Uber/Lyft to bring in extra income. We put any extra money we received towards our debt. Tax refunds, stimulus checks, bonuses from work... Any and every extra dollar we got, went towards debt. We meant that thing. We were so sick and tired of the weight of our debt and it made no sense to continue carrying it as if it was normal. 

Now, looking back on that time of our lives, I guess it was normal. I guess you could say, living in debt, is arguably one of the most normal ways people choose to live. Well, we were over it. We were ready to be different. Not normal. We used the snowball method and paid off $127,614.84 in 32 months. In August 2022 we officially became debt free!

While paying off our debt, The Most High was still working with us on our personal and spiritual issues. He began to show us through His word, where we were falling short in our faith walk. He also began to show us how our weak relationship with Him was having a direct impact on our marriage and family life. We had to look within ourselves and confront our own personal issues to discover the marriage and family He intended for us to have.  All of this was happening around the time of our leaving the church in 2018. From that moment on, we began having Bible study in our home as a family. We’ve been having Bible study in our home ever since. And, we’ve learned more about scripture and The Most High’s will for our lives than all the years we spent in the church. We appreciate the foundation our upbringing laid, but we now understand why those “failed attempts,” to be part of a church community were not failed attempts at all. They were necessary steps that needed to happen in order to bring us to the place The Most High is now taking us. 

What's the most significant personal transformation you've ever experienced? How did it shape your life?

I’ll share Part 2 of this post next time and reveal two major changes on the horizon for our family. Be sure to check back.

Thanks so much for reading!