Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 3 · column 1 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
By Bill Kossler
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
The Reverend Leah DeLong has led the Rappahannock ’ Methodist Charge since this past June. She stepped into the fold and ;nto the community when the Reverend Merlin Shorb retired after a tenure of several decades with the Charge. It has been a happy meeting thus far. In the words of parishioner Richard Brady, “She’s just a very likable person, a very likable hardworking woman of God. She knows the scripture and preaches from it.”
DeLong’s path to the ministry was long and winding. She was bom in the town of Mt. Pleasant in western Pennsylvania. Her family moved to Garrett County, Maryland, in the westernmost part of Maryland, up in the hills, where DeLong says “it snows forever.”
DeLong came to Virginia for the first time in 1980 to work at Shenandoah National Park. She had recently received her bachelor’s degree in biology and was planning to go to graduate school in biology. But fate intervened. She met her future husband that year. They got married and had two children, upon which she focused for the next twenty years.
A winding road
to ministry
While raising her children, DeLong was a librarian and a substitute teacher, but put her main energies into motherhood. Still, she recalled, “ministry was always in the back of my mind.” Her son was a senior in high school when she began the seminary, embarking on a dream she’d had even as a child.
“When I was six or eight years old, I remember seeing a presentation by a missionary. It was the first time it occurred to me there were people who had no idea about
95.3%