For 40 years, my wife, Wendy, and I made a life in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. After we retired, our three adult children wound up settling in Pittsburgh. We both agreed we ought to follow them there. I didn’t want to be the out-of-town grandpa.
It was great being close to family, but as we drove to our new church one Sunday morning, I couldn’t help but miss what I’d left behind. We’d been active members of the same small church for decades. I had a community there. A community who had been with me through a lot of changes in my life. I had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a teenager, but it wasn’t noticeable when, as a young man, I first joined the church. As long as I didn’t try to reach for something overhead and lose my balance, no one could see that anything was different about me.
Over the
