Pull Up a Seat with Lindsay
Welcome back to the table. Episode 339 of Lunchtime In Rome had a slightly different energy—Lindsay, one of our faithful (almost-dozen) YouTube followers, joined us in person instead of from the other side of the screen. As we noted early on, she does not love being the center of attention, so we did our best to keep the spotlight moving. The result was a wide-ranging conversation that bounced from fall ball and a four-month-old puppy to multi-generational households, awkward funerals, and the quiet ways God sometimes uses a six-year-old to redirect a life.
Softball, Puppies, and the Long Season
We opened, as we often do, with the ordinary stuff. Maggie’s fall ball season is wrapping up; Thursday is her last game. No playoffs, and that’s fine. Fall ball is more about getting kids into the program and letting them learn than about trophies. Coach John has been a steady, positive presence for the younger kids in Penn Hills, and the program feels like it’s in a healthier place than it was a few years ago. Spring will be the more serious stretch.
Then there’s Toby. At roughly four months, he’s still very much a puppy, which means early mornings in the dark, constant supervision, and the general sense that someone has added another small, high-energy person to the household. Eric put it plainly: it feels a lot like having a second kid, and in some ways more exhausting. You can put the dog in the crate when you need a minute; you cannot do that with a child. Still, the fatigue is real. Between work, Toby, Maggie, and everything else, “Eric time” has been in short supply. The week looked open on the calendar until it didn’t. That tension—wanting rest while the brain keeps scanning for the next thing to handle—is familiar territory for a lot of people in this season of life.
Lindsay’s Story
When we turned to Lindsay, we asked for the longer version. Born in Penn Hills, she moved and attended St. Irenaeus in Oakmont before heading to Riverview. She was raised Catholic—heart-Italian on her dad’s side—and got confirmed. Her parents divorced when she was about twelve, around the same time as 9/11. She was a daddy’s girl, and the change was hard. She started having serious mental health struggles, including suicidal thoughts connected to medication she was prescribed. At twelve or thirteen she told her mom, they went to Forbes, and she ended up at Allegheny General’s adolescent unit for about a week. She has been in and out of therapy since. Looking back, she sees that season as the moment she decided she wanted to be able to help other people who felt the same way.
High school was fine but not great. She did some choir and a brief stint as a volleyball equipment manager. After graduation in 2006 she started at Point Park for journalism, came home every weekend, and eventually dropped out. Around the same time her grandmother began declining with dementia that progressed to Alzheimer’s. Lindsay got a job as a housekeeper at Seneca, later became a CNA, and eventually moved into an account-manager role at Caremark—work she has done remotely for years, a transition that happened just as COVID hit and that she has largely appreciated. Her grandmother passed in 2014.
She met her husband, Jay, when she was eighteen. They have been together twenty-two years and married for eleven. They lived together for a long time before marrying; a big wedding was never high on her list because she does not like being the center of attention. They still live in a multi-generational house with her mom. Her younger sister Sarah (by eighteen months) is close with her now; their relationship tightened after their grandmother’s death. There is also a much younger half-sister from her dad’s later relationship.
Finding Church Again
Lindsay stopped attending Catholic church in high school but never fully walked away from believing. For years she prayed occasionally and waited for a sense that it was time to go back. That sense arrived through her daughter, Lydia, who asked one day why they didn’t go to church. Lydia had been learning about baptism at school and wanted a place with children’s programming. Lindsay Googled “children’s church,” and Faith Community came up. She did her research first—Google, Facebook, the usual—because she was not interested in walking into something she hadn’t checked out. Growing up she had heard the neighborhood rumor that the church was “a cult church.” (We still hear versions of that about Young Life and plenty of other ministries. The short version: we don’t cut people off, we don’t hide information, and we don’t mind if you leave.)
She walked in the day after Memorial Day and has stayed. The first time she and Lydia visited, there happened to be baptisms. Lydia later confirmed she preferred this church over a larger one they visited in Florida. Lindsay got involved quickly. She went to Rachel looking for something to do (“Can’t just be blessed”), ruled out the sound booth, and landed in children’s church. That has been a natural fit, and it has also put her around Maggie, Lydia, and the other kids who are building their own small community.
Capernaum and What’s Next
The conversation eventually turned to Young Life and Capernaum, the special-needs side of the ministry. Lindsay’s niece is autistic, and that has shaped her interest. There is currently only one Capernaum in the Pittsburgh area, in the South Hills. After some back-and-forth and a meeting that left her in tears (in a good way), she has been working to get something started closer to home. The vision is practical as much as spiritual: kids with special needs get community and care, caregivers get a break, and, ideally, the higher-functioning Capernaum kids and the regular Young Life kids can cross-pollinate—cool older kids learning to serve, younger or higher-functioning kids getting to be the star for a night. She is also thinking about how the church can be a long-term home for some of those families, starting with the children’s ministry side.
Along the way we covered taekwondo (she and Lydia are both yellow belts), old Nick at Nite references, hunting stories from the church property, and the general sense that God has a habit of connecting dots that look random until you step back. Lindsay’s path—from the hospital at thirteen, through years of ordinary work and family life, to walking into a church because her daughter asked—has the shape of a lot of real stories. Nothing about it was tidy. Most of it was just one next step.
That is episode 339. We will be back next week for 340. Thanks for pulling up a seat.
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