When Dan Neal and his wife Terri were first married, they knew Dan’s career in the U.S. Navy would take them many places, so they wanted to be sure they had a faith experience that would ground them. Both had grown up in Columbia, and both were part of regular church-going families – Dan as a member of Main Street United Methodist and Terri as a member of Peterson Presbyterian.

Had you asked Anita Nelam in her 20s if she could imagine herself at almost 70, quarantined for a year during a global pandemic with her five children, she probably would have told you that was as crazy an idea as the storylines in some of the screenplays she has written, or as unlikely as being a statewide staffer for a presidential campaign for the country’s first African-American president.

Duane Dunn remembers when he first realized that the illness encroaching on the world in 2020 was more than a passing problem. As someone who worked in the healthcare industry with transplant patients, he was privy to studies in early 2020 that were saying, “This isn’t the flu.”

For the past six years, Regina Hitchcock has been running what she affectionately refers to as “Hitchcock Inc.”

Kate Jones, a registered nurse, remembers vividly the day she was making a house visit with an elderly patient in her home, and had an overwhelming sense that the extra time she had taken with the woman had probably been more important than the medical care she had provided.

When Molly Dougall first acquired her vaccine certification five years ago, she had no idea how significant that skill would prove to be. A pharmacist by training, Molly, 34, initially became certified to provide vaccinations with the pharmacy residency program that took her to rural Virginia in the heart of Appalachia.

As a boy, Mark Mayson was in constant motion. He was the kid who asked, “Why?”

“Why, why, why, why and why,” Mark recalled asking. As he matured and followed his interest in science, he discovered that the field’s systematic, methodical processes often led to answers. He liked that.