Christy Award-winning Christian fiction writer Lisa Samson describes her move from suburban Maryland to inner-city Lexington, Kentucky:

I'd call [our life before the move] a typical Christian suburban existence—we lived in a nice home in a nice suburb in Maryland. My husband, Will, commuted by train into Washington, D.C., for his corporate job. I wrote Christian fiction, home schooled our kids, and led our church's music ministry. I threw myself into volunteer work and Bible studies. I was busy trying to please God. But no matter what I did, I rarely felt closer to him.

Then, in 2004, I was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome (WPW), a form of heart arrhythmia that can cause a racing heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, and lightheadedness… Although there's only the slimmest chance I could die from WPW, when I was diagnosed, I decided I didn't want to waste whatever time I might have left. I took a yearlong sabbatical from writing to figure out what God wanted me to do by looking at what Jesus did. I reread the Gospels with fresh eyes—and stopped allowing myself to say "but": But Jesus, I'm just a human. But Jesus, you didn't have a family who depended on you. But Jesus, you said the poor will be with us always.

Then a woman who'd been influential in my life shared with me Isaiah 58, which is all about justice for the poor, the widow, the laborer, the refugee. The parallels between Isaiah's time and ours are major! We serve the same God today; he still cares about these things.

Opening my eyes to justice issues rocked everything this American Christian woman had ever thought about life and faith and country and church. …I had to come to grips with a God who lets his children suffer. That's when real faith kicked in, and I began to see suffering as a beautiful way of joining in Christ's suffering on the cross. …

We sensed God calling our family to something new, to take a step of faith. …At first I struggled with moving into the city, because I'd lived in the suburbs all my life. I also worried our kids wouldn't be safe. But Will and I decided we could look at safety two ways—as physical or as spiritual. Here in the city, our kids are developing faith muscles they never had to before. Maybe we're naïve, but we're trusting God to protect them; we actually feel their souls are safer here—seeing God in the eyes of the poor—than in our old neighborhood.…

I think we women need to branch out in our spheres of service and influence so our children can see what becoming Jesus to other people looks like. Then they can take that into their adult life. [But you don't have to move to the inner city to be obedient to God.] If you want to be radical for Christ in the suburbs, tell your neighbors, "I'm going to be content with my house and stay in this neighborhood until the day I die." That's a crazy thought in our upwardly mobile culture. To me [that's a stand for justice,] because what you're really saying is, I'll be content with what I have; I'm going to stop consuming so much. …When I turn my thermostat down to 72 degrees in the summer, a little girl in the Kentucky hills isn't going to get clean water for drinking or bathing because I'm consuming too much coal. Everything we do has an effect on somebody somewhere. …

No matter where you live, if you want to feel better about your life, do more than donate money. Do more than volunteer one night a year. You get a certain satisfaction from serving others, from knowing you're in the exact spot God wants you to be.