Hello. My name is Fe. By the late 90’s, I was, by most measures, a successful pastor, and had been for over twenty years. But in 1998, several events in rapid-fire succession would begin to change everything. In January of that year, I took a trip to Honduras where I discovered that HIV was ravaging the younger men and women of their generation. I started an organization called Project HeartStrong to build a hospice facility for them to die in.

In that summer, a third student in my community took his own life. A friend and I co-founded The Community Response Team to stop the suicidal contagion in that high school.

A family crisis, along with other factors, led me to resign from pastoral ministry and discern a different vocational path for my future.
Hurricane Mitch, a category five storm, slammed into Honduras late October, killing 8,000 persons and rendering a million homeless. In early November, I founded an effort called Ohio Hurricane Relief for Central America, and was on the front lines in Honduras distributing food, medicine, and clothing. We outperformed the local Red Cross in that effort.

Three years later I, myself, was in need of help. I was between jobs, broke, going through a divorce, estranged by most of my family, and essentially homeless, with all my worldly possessions packed into my car. By November, 2003, the pressures had become so intense that I found myself at a counter to purchase a gun to take my life. I didn’t know whether I would survive, but, thankfully, a new day did dawn in my life.

With time, I gradually came to realize that I was engaged in a midlife awakening, a process of transformation, the reinvention of my life. I came to call myself a Second Day Person. In my Second Day a major shift in my orientation to people has occurred. Thoreau wrote that “the great mass of men live lives of silent desperation.” It is not only silent; it is largely invisible. Millions of people throng our temples, synagogues, and churches weekly who are suicidally desperate, estranged by friends and family members, abused by intimate partners, aging into oblivion, engaged in clandestine sexual relationships, or bearing a crushing burden of regret for some past indiscretion or criminal activity.

I now realize that I am not alone. Not everyone goes through the same kind of dark night that I did, but so many people today find themselves in desperate situations, alone, trapped, and in pain. These are the very persons that Jesus reached out to. Over the past 25 years, these have become my focus. I have founded a number of organizations and movements to address those needs. This website highlights five of those.

Below you will find the book Michelle Snyder and I wrote about the reinvention process titled Life, Death, and Reinvention. For those feeling trapped in pain, it is better to risk reinventing your life than taking your life.

The page titled Damaged Good challenges faith communities to explicitly welcome those who are often invisible and shunned, the kind of people Jesus adopted as family.

The page titled Orphaned Elders seeks to address a critical issue in our society today, the 1 in 5 adults over the age of 65 who will have no one to take care of them  in their years of decline.

The page titled The Pattern encourages people of faith, particularly those who are struggling, to reflect on the life of Jesus as a template for their own human experience and developmental path.

Finally, the page Estranged Parents addresses an issue that has become a national epidemic, family estrangement in general, and parental estrangement in particular.

As human beings, we have all failed in a variety of ways, and we all bear the consequences. Guilt and shame should not be a life sentence.  The good news of God’s love is that we all deserve to recover.