Alex's Long Way Home

Alex's Long Way Home
Book One of The Sugar Fork Series

Alex Brenneman was raised Amish, in a home where questions were beaten out of a boy instead of answered. By nineteen, he was ready to end it all-until one patient, unhurried man by the name of Ben Fisher showed him that the very thing he'd been told was wicked might actually be a gift.

That lesson carried Alex through Bible school, a marriage to the steady, quietly remarkable Claire Yoder, and into a pulpit of his own-where his gift for teaching, left unchecked, nearly destroyed him and everyone who trusted him. Broken and humbled, Alex and Claire flee to the hills of northwestern Arkansas, hoping for nothing more than a quiet life and a fresh start.

What they find instead is a found family unlike any church either of them has known-a farmer with no formal theology and more wisdom than most seminary graduates, a fitness coach happily rooted in a different tradition altogether, a diner waitress running from a past that won't let her go, and a teenage girl who shows up one Sunday with a bruise she can't explain.

Each of them will ask Alex for something he swore he'd never give again.

Alex's Long Way Home is a story about the long, unglamorous work of healing-about a man learning that real strength isn't the absence of fear, but the courage to build something that can't be twisted the way he once was. Rooted in real Anabaptist conviction and written with warmth, humor, and unflinching honesty, this is the first book in a six-volume series about one small Ozark church and the ordinary, extraordinary people who call it home.