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May 17, 2026

Rooted

What small towns know that the rest of the world has forgotten

I grew up in St. Michaels, Maryland, a small, quaint town on the Eastern Shore where the crabs were plentiful, the music drifted through open windows on summer evenings, and just about everybody knew your name.

It was the kind of place where you didn’t lock your doors, where neighbors showed up before you asked, and where community wasn’t a word people used. It was just the way things were.

I remember one afternoon as a young woman when my car broke down and I didn’t have the money to fix it. A local shop owner helped me anyway.

No fanfare. No invoice I couldn’t pay. Just a man who saw a need and met it, the way people did back then. The way people still do in the places that haven’t forgotten.

I didn’t fully appreciate it then. Most of us don’t. We’re young, we’re restless, and we’re convinced that life is happening somewhere just beyond the horizon.

So we go.

We chase careers, relationships, dreams. We build ourselves up and sometimes watch it all come apart. We move through stages: the striving years, the struggling years, the years we’d rather forget, and, if we’re lucky, the years where something finally settles inside us.

And somewhere in those stages, most of us realize the same thing:

We were never meant to do this alone.

Scripture puts it plainly in Ecclesiastes 4:9-10:

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: if either of them falls down, one can help the other up.

That verse isn’t just wisdom. It’s a description of what I watched lived out on the streets of St. Michaels before I ever had words for it.

Whatever stage of life you find yourself in right now, the building years or the rebuilding years, the season of plenty or the one that’s brought you to your knees, you were not designed to navigate it alone.

That is not a self-help idea. It is the intentional design of a God who created us for one another.

Talbot County still knows this.

You can feel it in the way people show up for each other here, in the small gestures, the open doors, the neighbors who notice.

That is not coincidence. That is community the way God designed it. And it is still one of the most powerful forces for healing, growth, and hope that any of us will ever experience.

I’m glad to be back in it, and glad to be here with you.