In the early 1980s, soon after my birth, my parents founded a Teen Challenge program in Wheeling, WV. This ministry was our family’s central focus until May of 1990, when my father (the Executive Director) unexpectedly died from a cardiac arrest while playing racquetball with the TC boys. I was ten, and my older sister was 14. Instantly, everything changed. In addition to the obviously overwhelming grief, we lost a large part of our income. But my mother also lost a ministry and much of her support system. She had to seek God’s vision for her suddenly drastically different future; and in many ways, we had to redefine our identity as a family.

The next several months and years were ones of struggle: not being able to access their joint bank account and fighting to keep our house, having to step away from their ministry, and single parenting. They were lean years - meager meals, little clothing, few toys, and even a winter spent with no heat or hot water. But they were also years of plenty - her teaching us by example how to help others whose struggle was greater than our own, and deep growth as we learned extreme reliance on God for our everything.

As I grew and experienced our local church’s lack of response to our struggles, I questioned the faith of the supposed role models in my life: my Sunday school and youth group leaders, deacons, pastor, and even the church as a whole. Looking through the grey lenses of pain, loss, and struggle, I became embittered with the church and questioned the validity of Christianity.

I read verses such as, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress...” (James 1:27a). In Acts 6 deacons were established because people advocated for some widows who were being overlooked in the daily food distribution, and I wondered why the deacons ignored our bare table. Eventually in my teen frustration, I confronted our church leaders about what (according that Bible passage) I thought was their impure and faulted faith by turning a blind and apathetic eye to us, a widow and orphans. Their answer: “She never asked.” But I knew these men; I was friends with their children. I had heard them comment how she only ever wore three outfits, but they never considered that there wasn’t money to buy more. I felt she shouldn’t have had to subjugate herself to further scrutiny, ridicule, or to swallow her pride. It was their Biblical responsibility to ask how the church could help. They didn’t. My father died, but I felt like it was the church who abandoned us.

Without my mother’s prayerful guidance during those formative years, I would have turned my back on the church. She showed me that we are still called to be the hands and feet of Christ, even when others have fallen short. We’re responsible for our own actions, not the actions of others. We are called to give mercy to those in need, and grace to imperfect Christians. When my local church led me to doubt, the strength my mother gained through daily reliance and continual communion with her God made it possible for me to believe in a God who also shows me steadfast love. And today, I am the church, and I often fall short as well. The grace she taught me to give, I find I need to extend to myself. Each of us has room to improve, don’t we?

The church then, and the church today, needs to do a better job proactively serving our widows, widowers, and orphans. It is Biblically mandated, and the rising generation’s faith may depend on it.