Four windows into what happens when curiosity meets real life.
These stories came from people in our community. Real conversations, real relationships, real moments that changed how someone saw the world. They are shared here not as finished lessons but as doorways into what becomes possible when someone decides to slow down and pay attention.
The second week Christi was teaching English at the refugee center, she was paired one-on-one with a man named Isaac. He was from the Congo. His first night with her, he said: "My Africa is very bad. The United States is very good."
Isaac had lost his wife and three children in a refugee camp in Burundi. He had been shot and carried a bandage on one arm. And yet when he talked about his life, there was something underneath the grief, a current of resilience, even joy, that Christi wasn't expecting.
The friendship grew. Christi and her husband helped Isaac get settled, introduced him to their children. He had a strong connection with their family. Eventually, he asked if he could bring his sister Roserati and a woman named Cedaria over for dinner.
When they walked in, Isaac introduced them: Roserati, whose husband and several of her children had been killed in the same massacre that took his family. And Cedaria, whose husband had been a pastor and whose six children had been killed. That was how he introduced them. Those were the facts he started with.
They had dinner. They prayed before they ate. Isaac and his guests told stories about what life had been like in the refugee camps, about a yearly remembrance gathering where survivors come from across the country to pray and sing and cry together. People always look for Cedaria there, she said, because her husband was the pastor. They come to pay their condolences.
At the end of the meal, Cedaria said she wanted to pray for Christi's family. Her English wasn't strong enough, she said. She would have to do it in Swahili.
Right there at the table, all three of them began to pray. Not in unison but all at once, passionate and overlapping, in words Christi couldn't follow at all.
Afterward, she and her husband looked at each other across the table. "That was one of the coolest things that has ever happened," she said.
She went home that night and looked up the massacre. She found a page filled with condolences for Cedaria's husband. A man of peace, widely mourned, who had written before his death that he felt blessed to have reconciled with his Creator and to have helped others do the same.
A few years ago, a letter arrived at the Christian radio station David Nadler was running. Pulse 99.5, in Des Moines.
The letter came from a man named Brandon, writing from the Newton Correctional Facility. He wanted to be part of the Pulse community. He enclosed a dollar or two.
Inmates at Newton earn about 42 cents an hour.
Something tugged at David when he read it. Something else pushed back: he was busy. He could pass it along to someone else. He almost did.
He didn't, and he's glad.
David wrote back. Then he went to visit. Brandon was 21 years old, incarcerated for armed robbery after growing up in a gang. His father was also at Newton. Brandon joked, David said, that he was in prison with about as many of his family members as were outside of it. Which was kind of funny, he said. Kind of not.
What David found was a young man in the early stages of a genuine faith. Recently converted, trying to figure out what it meant to live as a Christian inside the walls of a correctional facility, with no money, few prospects, and a family background that made everything harder.
Over months of visits, they became something like brothers. Brandon called David his mentor. David pushed back: "God put us together because Brandon had needs and I have needs. We're just providing for each other."
What David hoped for most was that Brandon would one day be able to go back to his family and his roots. That he could be an insider there. That his story wouldn't end where it seemed to be heading.
That's the thing about genuine curiosity. You can't control where it takes you. But it almost always takes you somewhere you needed to go.
A friend of David's owns a construction company. His goal in life, this friend says, is to help people who can't give him anything back.
That sentence cuts through a lot of noise. It gets past the warm feeling of doing something good and into something more durable: the decision to invest not because of what you might get, but because of what you can give.
David has spent years learning what that looks like in practice.
He was part of the team that started Wildwood Hills Ranch in St. Charles, Iowa, a summer camp built for at-risk children. Each summer, they brought about 75 campers in from the city for five days with a team of counselors, then drove them home. The work was slow, unpredictable, and deeply human.
During those years, a 13-year-old boy named Kyle moved in with David and his wife Bernadette. He stayed for 20 months. There were stretches that were genuinely hard. During the hardest ones, David said, God reminded him of something: infinite patience had been extended to him, and that ought to count for something. You can't let things rattle you. You look at the situation and figure out what this person needs right now.
He mentions a friend who took a young man deer hunting. The boy had never been before. His friend just jumped in.
The skill of mentoring, David says, doesn't come from having done everything right. It comes from life experience. From knowing what not to do every bit as much as what to do. From deep compassion that stops you from turning a blind eye when someone is drawn into your path. And from unflappable patience.
Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed. The smallest seed in the field, planted by a man in his field. When it grew full, it became large enough for the birds of the air to come and nest in its branches.
One summer at Wildwood Hills Ranch, there was an eight-year-old named Jimmy.
He spent the entire week collecting small things from the ground. A neat rock. A discarded fishing lure. A shiny piece of metal dug out of the dirt. He was always moving, always looking down, always finding something new to tuck away in a safe place. For a lot of the kids at the ranch, being safe was not something they took for granted. Jimmy had very few clothes and a small bag of possessions. He watched his treasures carefully.
On the bus ride back to the city, David sat next to him. Things got quiet as the drive went on. Jimmy began laying his collection out on his lap: everything from the week, along with an art project he was bringing home.
David reached over and patted his head. The way he would have done with one of his own boys.
Jimmy leaned into the touch. He looked down at the things in his lap. Then, slowly and carefully, he picked up the shiny piece of metal and held it toward David.
He wanted him to take it.
Providing shelter, David writes, is a calling that costs. It costs time, talents, and treasures. It costs a part of your heart. But when you see what it does in another person's life, and in your own, you begin to understand what Jesus meant by the mustard seed. Small things planted in good soil. Birds finding a place to rest.
These are four stories among countless others.
Every person is walking through a life that no one else has lived. Curious Journey: Why Your Story Matters was written to help you recover your sense of wonder at your own experience, and to find the courage to share it with the people around you.
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