Hello, We are The Shalom Story, founded by Jessica Farhan.

In Jessica’s Own Words:
This is a story of how God led me to where I am. It started in a small town and moved to Chattanooga towards the needs of our neighbors and refugees.

My Shalom Story.

This is not my story of struggle, rather His story of salvation.

If Shalom in its original Hebrew context means “to destroy the authority attached to chaos” then the first step in the journey toward it is often chaos. This is where my Shalom story starts, with broken pieces and a broken heart in 2013. When the life that I had planned fell apart.

A Journey in Motion: Tanzania

As I was recovering from a painful divorce and the reality that the life I had been building was falling apart when I had an opportunity to spend a summer using my career as a nurse to serve at a small hospital in a village in Tanzania. With open hands and a broken heart, I said yes. Growing up on a farm and coming from a small town, the experience in Tanzania changed my life and, in some way, started to heal my own heart. I saw how big God is. I saw a great need in our brothers and sisters worldwide to have the resources I had been so freely given in my life in the United States. I came home changed. My Shalom journey was in motion.

New Directions: Supporting the Refugee Community at Home

With a new burden for the nations and a desire to do my part in sharing all that had been entrusted to me, I began volunteering for an organization an hour from my home that helped refugees find a home when they arrived in Chattanooga. I was changed and challenged once again. I had met two young brothers from Sudan who arrived alone after spending almost a decade in a refugee camp. They became family to me. Through my relationship with them, I began to see unmet needs in the entire refugee community.

I followed the Lord and accepted the call to do something about what I had been shown. This involved leaving my job, selling my possessions and my home, and moving into the refugee community to live among them. It was during this time the nonprofit Neigh’tions was conceived in my heart and then born into the city of Chattanooga.

I could not relate to the stories around me my neighbors would share of having to flee a country due to violence and war, but I could relate to something more important. I could relate to the pain that comes with grieving the loss of a life you once loved. As my neighbors would share broken dreams with me, I would share my broken dreams with them. Then I would share the new direction I was finding in the midst of my broken pieces and believe with them (sometimes for them) that they would find the same. We began to walk the Shalom story together.

In 2016 God had the next big step planned in my personal journey toward healing. As a new young man from Iraq started attending some of the programs, we were offering through Neigh’tions I felt led to invite him to a Bible study taking place in my home. The goal of the study was to provide a safe space for people from all backgrounds and cultures to have a place to discuss thoughts and ideas and walk toward truth together. I had no way of knowing a short year later God would put us together as husband and wife. Our Shalom stories unite and the fight to destroy the authority attached to the chaos from both our pasts was on.

Finding Tools for Trauma

Because I value transparency and authenticity and believe they are vital in our ability to walk others toward healing I will be honest, this was hard. Really hard. My husband, a refugee from Iraq, had spent the first 40 years of his life in war and as a human was carrying the chaos of that experience. The unresolved trauma connected to my painful divorce and its circumstances began to show the authority it still had on my life. We were stuck.

I began to look around at other families in our refugee community, stuck in their own trauma. As much as we needed a tool, I longed to offer them a tool as well. Something that would break through all the boundaries of culture, language, and stereotypes.  It was a season of prayer. A season of seeking the Lord and a season for my husband and me to learn how to gently come alongside each other's journey toward Shalom. It was painful. It was hard. It didn’t always make sense. However, there was a breakthrough and beauty; for the first time, we began experiencing Shalom together. But what about the community around me?

Crossing Barriers: Equestrian Therapy

The more wholeness and healing we experienced the more passionate I became to find a way that could lead others toward a breakthrough. In May 2022 the Lord answered. He led me to attend a training where for the first time I witnessed horses coming alongside people in their stories of struggle and trauma. For the first time, I saw and witnessed a tool that had no cultural bias or language preference.

God spoke. He answered and here we are following. So, what does that look like? My husband and I are now proud new owners of an Arabian horse named “Shalom” and are currently working on adding her into the equine program. We have joined hands with two different farms and are activating and building a program there to specifically serve vulnerable people groups within the Chattanooga area. My husband and I continue to walk our own Shalom story and are humbled and grateful to have this new tool to come alongside our community’s salvation story. We are grateful to continue serving the refugee community with this new tool as well as other vulnerable people groups who experience barriers toward healing and whose lives are impacted by the effects of trauma.

Did you know at its root meaning in Greek the word Salvation translates into meaning “to be healed”?

This is not my story of struggle, but rather His story of Salvation. Salvation, once received, must be shared. When we receive healing, we become vessels through which others can be healed.

2 Corinthians 1:4 He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others.