You can be lonely in a city full of people. I think that's one of the quietest pains of modern life — surrounded, but not known. You have contacts, not friends. You have a feed, not a table. And some nights you sit in your apartment in Rochester, NY, scrolling through everybody else's togetherness, wondering why yours hasn't happened yet. I've sat in that loneliness myself. There have been seasons of my life — new city, new calling, everything unfamiliar — where I knew hundre

Every city has people it would rather not see. In Rochester, for years, one answer to homelessness was to raze the encampments and scatter the people — out of sight, out of mind. This week, our city took a step in a different direction, and Christians in Rochester should be paying attention. ## What happened According to the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester may reopen Peace Village — the city's only sanctioned homeless encampment — after years on hiatus. A $1.15 million fund

Some stories remind you what courage actually looks like. Not the movie kind — the real kind, where there's no script, no second take, and no pause button. This week, Rochester got one of those stories, and it deserves to be told. ## What happened On September 22, Rochester police officer Nicole Amatore was named New York's 2026 Police Officer of the Year by Governor Kathy Hochul. The award traces back to a night just days before Christmas last year, when Amatore responded to

On Monday night, September 21, another Rochester family got the knock on the door that no family should ever get. A 28-year-old man was rushed to Strong Memorial Hospital and never came home. I did not know Dynell Babers-White. But he was our neighbor — a young man living in northeast Rochester, in a house on Roth Street just north of Clifford Avenue. And when violence takes one of our neighbors, it takes something from all of us. News like this moves through a city in a part