“Something Better” by Dustin Renz

Tom Schneider’s life is a mess. His wife Julie has left him, taking their 4-year-old daughter Kayla and moved in with her mother. He’s sinking deeper into depression. And he’s still trying to escape the years of physical abuse he and his mother endured at the ends of his father.

Tom is one big mess of anger, hurt, and depression. He’s got a single lifeline – the desire to be reunited with his family. But that looks increasingly impossible. Then a letter from his father arrives, asking to see him. Instead, Tom flies from Michigan to his boyhood home near Atlanta, and a slow process of forgiveness and reconciliation begins. But will it last?

Something Better by Dustin Renz is the story of Tom Schneider, but it could be the story of many of us. It’s about the damage that happens in families continuing down through the generations. It’s about the struggle to hold a failing marriage together. It’s about learning to forgive and learning to be forgiven. And it’s a story about how a young man comes to faith, and how his faith changes him before it begins to change his life and the people around him.

Dustin Renz

It’s also the story of any of us caught in a web of the past and our own mistakes, problems, and sins.

Renz is the Associate and Outreach Pastor at the Kettering Assembly of God in Kettering, Ohio, the founder of Make Way Ministries, and a contributing writer and speaker for Pure Life Ministries in Dry Ridge, Kentucky. He is also the author of Pile of Masks: Exposing Christian Hypocrisy (2016). Renz received a B.S. degree in church ministries from Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida. He and his family live in Dayton, Ohio. 

Using an alternating series of flashbacks and contemporary scenes, Something Better points toward how each of us can, well, find something better in faith.

Top photograph by Eric Ward via Unsplash. Used with permission.