New Covenant needs more than a pastor who can fill a pulpit. Its bills are mounting, its leadership is divided, and its place in the community has become uncertain. Wesley Aames arrives carrying losses of his own, which makes his assignment less a conventional rescue mission than a difficult test of what care looks like when neither the caregiver nor the institution is whole.
How Do You Live Without Love? places grief, congregational conflict, public judgment, and found family within the everyday work of a struggling Appalachian church. Wesley counsels teenagers, answers crisis calls, tends the grounds, and stands beside people whose pain has become public spectacle. The result is a story interested not only in belief, but in the quieter question of whether mercy can be practiced when certainty has disappeared.
How Do You Live Without Love?
The Dying Church Series Book 1
by Anthony Bradshaw
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Found Family
Wesley Aames shows up to New Covenant as a man who has already lost everything—wife, daughter, and the will to keep going. Hired to revive a sleepy Appalachian church, he finds a congregation on life support: dwindling funds, fractious trustees, and a choir director who distrusts the new pastor from day one.
When a teenager dies by suicide and her mother's humiliation explodes online, Rosa Lee becomes a magnet for cameras and contempt. Wesley, barely a pastor and twice a stranger to mercy, steps into the storm—counseling teens, calming old ladies, cutting the grass, answering crisis hotline calls—trying to make faith look like rescue instead of rhetoric.
As the church's finances and patience run out, a vote looms: keep the earnest, flawed pastor or replace him with steadier hands. But when the outside world shows up with microphones and accusations. Wesley's choices become literal life or death. Can a man who still blames himself for his family's deaths save strangers—and in doing so, finally forgive himself? This is a story about grief, messy grace, and the small acts that sometimes hold a town together.
Wesley’s work at New Covenant gives the novel an unusual measure of faith: not polished sermons or easy answers, but whether he will answer the telephone, sit with a frightened teenager, defend a woman being condemned in public, or feed a damaged stray dog before reporting to work. Those ordinary decisions allow the story to examine compassion as conduct rather than rhetoric.
The church itself is more than a backdrop. Its dwindling funds, suspicious trustees, internal rivalries, and approaching leadership vote create a second crisis alongside Wesley’s private grief. His effort to help the congregation survive therefore becomes inseparable from his attempt to understand whether a life fractured by loss can still be useful to other people.
The Asheville setting and the pressure of a media-fueled scandal widen the conflict beyond one pastor’s recovery. Private suffering becomes public material, and Wesley must decide what loyalty and mercy require when cameras, accusations, and communal fear begin shaping the story.
Wesley walked today rather than ran. Too tired to run, he needed time for introspection, processing, and perhaps a re-balancing of his inner psyche. He had always prided himself on his self-control and equilibrium. Rarely did he lose his temper or act without thought. Wesley started the play list that featured Jan
Then Wesley saw him. The ugliest, mangiest looking dog Wesley ever. The few spots where he had hair were brown. One leg was missing. One ear looked chewed off and the way he cocked his head made Wesley think the dog was blind in one eye. “Hey there,” Wesley said. The dog took a step back. Wesley kneeled on the damp ground. “Hey boy.”
The dog held his ground this time. He cocked his head and watched Wesley with his good eye. Using the universal and timeless signal between dogs and the people they owned everywhere, Wesley clucked his tongue. The dog’s one good ear twitched. A little.
Turning around, Wesley took a few steps away from the three-legged, one-eyed, one-eared dog and whistled. The dog barked. Wesley kept walking. The dog barked again. Twice. Louder this time. Wesley turned back and looked at the dog. “Come on, if you want to,” said Wesley with a smile. The dog barked at Wesley, and then he trotted to where Wesley stood, looked up at him and barked. Man and dog walked the streets of Asheville.
Back at the parsonage, Wesley knew he would be late for work, but he did not care. The dog needed to eat.
“As funny as it would be to watch you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, how about I give you corned beef hash? It’s canned. I haven’t had time to make fresh–but I will, I promise. Just for you. Well, and me. I’ll have some of this as well for my breakfast. You won’t care if I heat it or not. So, let’s rough it and eat it straight out of the can. You know, like the cavemen did.” The dog sat back on his one good haunch and waited–like dogs do.
“Here you go, pal.” Wesley spooned half of the can onto a paper plate. “You know, missing a couple body parts like you do, looks like you have stories to tell. You may be the luckiest dog alive.” Wesley kept up a constant stream of chatter to put the dog at ease. The dog barked and moved closer. Wesley took the opportunity, while the dog devoured his food, to check the dog’s collar and tag.
“George.”
The dog stopped eating, backed up, and growled.
Wesley looked at the dog and said it again. “George.”
The dog growled and barked. It was a different bark from any of the earlier barks.
Wesley pointed at the collar and tag. “The tag says your name is George,” reasoned Wesley.
George growled and barked.
Wesley squatted and clicked his tongue. “Come here, boy.”
He placed a slight emphasis on the last word. George wagged his tail and inched close enough to resume eating, which he did.
“George,” said Wesley. “George” backed up a few feet–out of Wesley’s reach. His one good eye darted between Wesley and the half-eaten corned beef hash.
“Come here.” Wesley clicked his tongue.
The dog stared at Wesley for a moment before coming close enough to eat his few remaining bites.
“Well, it looks like you don’t care much for your old name. I bet I can call you anything if I feed you. How about…Lucky?”
Wesley looked over “Lucky’s” three-legged, one-eared, and one-eyed body and just shook his head at the irony of calling this dog “Lucky.” That sealed it. “I wonder if you only have one nostril working?” Wesley laughed. “You oughta see the other dog, huh? Right, Lucky?”
Wesley kneeled and scratched behind the dog’s good ear and repeated his new name — Lucky. Before Wesley left for work, he pulled up the picture of his family on his cell phone and introduced the newest member of his family to the picture of his wife and daughter.
Lucky finished the can of cold corned beef hash and drank water from the empty can.
This novel belongs on the reading lists of those drawn to character-driven stories about grief, community responsibility, and imperfect people attempting useful work. Its church setting will be especially relevant to readers interested in the practical tensions inside a congregation—money, leadership, trust, reputation, and the distance that can develop between a stated mission and daily behavior.
Readers who value found-family fiction may connect with the relationships Wesley forms while trying to rebuild New Covenant. The book may also appeal to those who prefer faith-centered stories that allow doubt, anger, institutional conflict, and personal failure to remain part of the conversation rather than resolving them through simple assurances.
The storyline involving a teenager’s death by suicide and the public humiliation of her mother introduces emotionally difficult material. Readers comfortable with serious contemporary fiction that addresses bereavement, suicide, crisis intervention, and media scrutiny will be best prepared for its subject matter.
I've had several "careers." I've taught robotics; been a hospital administrator, served in the National Guard, bussed tables and flipped burgers. Above all else, I am a husband, father, and grand-pere'. I am a native of North Carolina and currently reside near Asheville.
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How Do You Live Without Love? asks its central question through people and institutions that have already been wounded. Wesley cannot restore his family, erase the congregation’s divisions, or control the public appetite for scandal. What remains within his reach are immediate acts of attention: listening, feeding, answering, defending, and staying present when withdrawal would be easier.
That emphasis gives the novel its clearest identity. The survival of New Covenant and Wesley’s own movement through grief depend less upon a single dramatic revelation than upon a series of choices about whom he will serve and what he will do next. For readers interested in contemporary fiction where community is built through flawed, practical care, Anthony Bradshaw’s opening volume in The Dying Church Series offers a thoughtful place to begin.
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