<p>This story follows Sandy a 19-year-old woman as she makes the difficult transition from living in an insular religious community to &ldquo;outside&rdquo; life in a college town. Sandy struggles with:<br /><br />&bull; Living alone when she has always been surrounded by a close family;<br />&bull; Meeting different types of people when she has always been in a small community;<br />&bull; Making her way with new people who don&rsquo;t think or act like those at home&mdash;she has to figure out how they think and what they actually mean by what they say and how they act;<br />&bull; Meeting men who live and work in environments &ndash; a college campus a military base&mdash;that are the total opposites of the community she has known all her life;<br />&bull; Dealing with her need to find love and hopefully a marriage in a new world without the guidelines of her strict community or the oversight of her family;<br />&bull; Falling in love with a man who is so totally different from her father brothers cousins and all the men she has known in her life and in fact is a soldier someone whom her pacifist religious community would find totally unacceptable;<br />&bull; Finding a church home and a place where she can live with her strong religious convictions even though she does not totally accept the limitations of her original church;<br />&bull; Coping with love and loss putting lessons of forgiveness into practice and picking up the pieces of a broken heart without becoming bitter.</p><p>Short Story Press publishes short stories written by everyday writers.</p>