To Belong

When Doris first walked through the doors of Redeemer Episcopal Church, she wasn’t looking for a committee or a cause. She was looking for a place to land.

After the death of her husband, grief had a way of shrinking Doris’s world. She felt herself withdrawing, quietly, steadily, unsure of how to re-enter life when everything familiar had changed. It was her neighbors who finally invited her to Redeemer, and something in her knew almost immediately: this was the place for her.

What Doris encountered was more than a friendly greeting. It was a community where she felt fully seen and deeply respected.

“We are at church,” Doris says. “It does not matter who you are, what color your skin is, what your sexual preferences are. It does not matter. At our church, we are welcoming. We treat you with respect, and it makes you feel that way. I love that the most.”

That radical, lived-out welcome created the safety Doris needed, not just to show up, but to belong.

With encouragement from Father Wiley and her Redeemer family, Doris began to heal, and then she knew she was called to help others heal, too.

She helped start Mending Hearts, a group for widows navigating loss and loneliness. What began as a small circle of shared grief has grown into a ministry of presence and purpose. The group now hosts funeral receptions at Redeemer, offering hospitality and tenderness in moments of deep sorrow, and regularly visits residents at a local assisted living facility, meeting people where they are, just as Doris once needed to be met.

“And I love meeting people. Being a greeter and usher is the one job I would fight to give up,” she says with a sincere smile.

But at the same time Doris was finding her footing again, she was also living through another long season of heartbreak as a mother.

For more than twenty years, her daughter Michelle struggled with addiction. There were cycles of treatment and relapse, hope and disappointment. Over time, Michelle’s addiction began to drain Doris financially and emotionally, as she asked for more and more help. With the prayerful support of her Redeemer community and Father Wiley, Doris made one of the hardest decisions of her life: she set firm boundaries and, eventually, cut Michelle off completely, not out of anger, but out of love and faith that enabling was not healing.

That decision did not end the pain, but it helped create the conditions for transformation.

After hitting rock bottom, Michelle entered a faith-based recovery program. This time, something was different. Five years later, Michelle is sober and now works at that very recovery center, walking alongside others who are where she once was. Drawing on years of struggle, relapse, and hard-won insight, she helps people find their way toward life again.

Michelle came into community seeking healing. She became part of it.

So did Doris.

Their stories mirror one another in a quiet, powerful way: two women shaped by loss in different forms, who found communities that held them through their hardest seasons and then trusted them enough to step into service. At Redeemer, healing is not a private experience or a finished product. It is something that flows outward, from one life to another.

Doris and Michelle are living reminders of what happens when a church practices genuine welcome and courageous love. People don’t just survive. They are restored and then sent to help restore others.