At 14, Alex Hammond is an unusually well traveled teenager, but he has never visited a landscape quite like what he experienced on the Camino de Santiago this summer. Because his mother's family still lives in Italy, he has made multiple trips there to visit cities such as Milan and Rome, but big cities are very different from the rural landscape that much of the camino winds its way through.

If you were to enter Christy and Bill Case’s home, you might notice four beautiful calligraphed certificates framed near their front door.

Christy hung the family’s compostellas or camino certificates there to remind them that they are each pilgrims of Christ, and that though the journey can sometimes be hard, it can also be beautiful and filled with unexpected surprises, including people who encourage you along the way.

When the Rev. Deacon Dianna Deaderick  decided to walk a portion of the Camino de Santiago this summer, she had two reasons for her decision.

First, she wanted to use the walk as an opportunity to discern what to focus on during her work at St. Martin's. (She began serving as St. Martin's deacon right before Easter.) And second, she wanted an opportunity to build community with members of the parish.

Grace Allen’s long life has seen a lot of ups and downs – much like the musical tabletop carousel that sits in her living room year-round. The whimsical music box plays both Christmas carols and the carousel song, joyfully, like Grace lives her life.

Grace, who turned 91 on April 28, found the carousel in a New Orleans gift shop in 2007, while on a football trip to watch the Gamecocks play. “I could hear it playing in the entranceway, and I just had to have it.”

Frank Avignone finds it intriguing that as he nears the ninth decade of his life – he turns 89 in May – he is firmly planted at a church by the name of St. Martin’s.

That is because his experience with church life began at another St. Martin’s, though a Roman Catholic one in Amityville, N.Y., back in the late 1930s, early 1940s. “I was born a long time ago,” he says, eyes twinkling.

Over the arc of Marie Askins’ life, she has seen technology move from a radio crystal to an operator-connected telephone system to a dialing phone system to cell phones. And she confesses, the most recent changes have been fast, furious and “frustrating” to keep up with.

“Very,” she noted with a smile.

Sometimes in life we encounter a season when we need the support of a community more than we could have imagined. For Penny Thomas, that moment came in the 17th year of her marriage. It was the mid-2000s, and her husband, Bill Thomas, was diagnosed with ALS. Within three years, the rare neurological disease took his life. He left behind Penny, who was 44 at the time, and their two children, William, who was 9, and Elizabeth, who was 6.

Kate Gellatly’s faith is intricately woven into her day-to-day life.

She isn’t flashy about what she believes, or one to coerce someone into coming to church with her, but she does believe that the way you live can have an impact on others. If they see you living in a way that is inviting, they just might want to find out more about what is informing your way of life.

Virginia Cooper’s journey with the ­Episcopal Church began as many others’ church journeys have – with a baptism. Hers, as an infant. By the renowned, late Rev. John Spong, no less.

For Gordon Thomas, Sunday mornings evoke fond memories of being hurried out the door with his three siblings to get to Sunday school on time at St. Martin’s. “Sunday school was big with 10 to 15 kids in your class,” Gordon said. “Every Sunday you were going to Sunday school.” And after that, church, and then home for a big family lunch.

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.