Just like those wise pilgrims from the East who followed the star to Bethlehem only to return home by another way, Carla Louca and Susannah LeMay took some unexpected detours to find purpose and meaning.
And, in the end, the mother-daughter duo saw the light of Christ reflected in each other.
Samual Polanco is no stranger to the power of walls.
Especially their potential to exclude.
Polanco, a 2022 graduate of the Menaul School — a PC(USA)-related, grades 6-12 college preparatory school located in Albuquerque, New Mexico — has faced walls his entire life.
As a lifelong advocate of the connectional church, the Rev. Ben Franklin Whitfield might never have expected that this denominational doctrine would one day prove indispensable to him at his own time of greatest need.
Like most people, the Rev. Meg Shoeman subscribed to the myth that clergy are superhuman.
“People tend to think if you’re in ministry in some capacity that you’re probably fine and you don’t have any needs,” said Shoeman, “but we’re all human and needs do arise.”
Just as they did for her.
At first, nothing about Stillman College reminded Johnykqua Bevans and Rayondre Roberts of their home on the tropical island of Grand Bahama: not Alabama, not the food, not their classmates and not the as-yet unfamiliar Presbyterian tradition in which the college is steeped.
But then there was the choir.
Seems like in one way or another, Jack and Kate Eisel have always been busy putting out fires — unless they were building them.
The couple met practically fireside in 2009 at Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Center, where Kate was the conference manager, and Jack, then a recently retired pastor, was volunteering in the maintenance department.
For Sarah Valentina Hernandez Solache, the colorful city of Zitácuaro in the Mexican state of Michoacán — where millions of Monarch butterflies bathe the fields and forests in a sea of orange during their annual migration — was, and always will be, home.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the entire world to rethink the way we conduct some of our most routine practices. Each year at this time schools across the nation would be welcoming their students and staff for another year of learning.
