When Faith Feels Far
In 2014, my husband and I were finishing up school and had our sights set on Cleveland.
With all the region’s rust and snow and diversity, we loved the city from afar and prayed one day that we wouldn’t be so far.
We moved in 2015. We packed up our 500-square-foot apartment in a pod, hearing tornado sirens that evening, and I was reminded that snow is better than tornado alley. My heart longed for the home we had not yet entered, the home outside of the Bible Belt.
We came into a church that was dying, hoping to inhale deeply, then breathe out new life. I knew that this would be the hardest thing we could choose to do. We anticipated the loneliness and imagined the painful rejections. We could never have foreseen being forgotten. If there was something else that we could have done, something that would have still allowed us to be obedient, we would have chosen that. But Christ’s Bride needed help in a little suburb of Northeast Ohio, and we couldn’t turn a blind eye.
