Simple Steps to Build Deeper Community (with Shannan Martin)

I beloved this week’s podcast dialogue with Shannan Martin on the subject matter of building link in our communities. My favored quote of the full episode was, “The only point you require to apply hospitality is a glass of water.” Meaning: opening up your doorway and providing a glass of drinking water is truly all it can take. (Or, conference on the back porch, or at the park, or at a coffee shop — as we speak about in this episode.)

If you need some inspiration for straightforward means you can build further interactions or are afraid of putting oneself out there and inviting persons and then obtaining turned down or harm, you

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Alexis Martin: A sex trafficked teen and an Ohio murder

The paperwork was signed, her belongings were stuffed into a plastic bag, and then, finally, it was time. She was guided down a long hallway. She stepped through a metal detector. A heavy door was pushed open, and Alexis Martin walked out of prison.

“Where am I going?” she asked her lawyers, hesitating on the sidewalk. It was April of 2020, the pandemic’s early days, when Ohio’s governor was going on television every afternoon to talk about shutdowns and masks and case counts — until the news conference when he had something else to announce. He was granting the release of a 22-year-old incarcerated woman.

“She was 15 years of age when she committed the crime,” Mike DeWine explained. “She is a child sex trafficking survivor.”

He was echoing what Alexis’s defenders had been arguing since the night in 2013 when the biracial 10th-grader was involved in a robbery that

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