Despite significant challenges in her life, Shara says she chooses to put her trust in God. “God has been taking care of everything,” she says. “I don’t know if there’s been a time in my life, even in the darkest moment, when he has not been there. This path of suffering, this very crooked path that has been a result of my stubbornness and my lack of trust in him, even in that he is constantly leading me to him.”

Born on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Shara’s father died when she was five years old, but she found father figures in her great-uncle and a parish priest. She often accompanied the priest on trips around the island to take holy Communion to those who couldn’t attend Mass. 

She later received her undergraduate degree from Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio and a master’s degree from Boston College. She worked in investment banking and wealth management on the East Coast for several years before moving back to Ohio. 

Then, something happened that she says “changed the trajectory of my life.”

In 2013, after a chance meeting at the Ohio State Fair with a woman who raised pigs, Shara says she put in her two weeks notice at the bank where she worked and decided to become an organic farmer.

“You know when you feel like God is moving you in a certain way and your heart feels convicted?” she says. “I was feeling the need to find something that felt like home for me.”

Like the St. Catherine of Siena quote, she says, “It felt as if my heart was on fire. This was where God was calling me. I had never felt that way before.”

After a while, Shara sold her home in Ohio and used the proceeds to invest in a farm business, eventually relocating to Michigan after marrying a man she met on a Catholic dating website.

Although he professed to be seeking a sacramental marriage, Shara says he was not. Her spiritual director and parish priest, also unaware of his true intentions, believed he also wanted a sacramental marriage. Shara says the man concealed that he had been married, divorced, and engaged multiple times outside of the Church. 

“As our relationship deteriorated, it became clear that he misled me and my faith community,” Shara says, adding that he deceptively never added her name to any joint business accounts, withdrew all the money from joint accounts they did have without her knowledge or consent, and sold farm equipment without her permission. Despite Shara being the sole financial provider for the family, her husband kicked her and the children out of his condo, leaving them homeless.

Shara says she and her two children, one of whom has severe autism, lived in several women’s shelters and relied on the generosity of others to get through that difficult time.

But in the summer of 2020, an old yellow farmhouse and property in Dansville came on the market and she purchased it. 

“I was in exactly the right place that I needed to be,” she says. “The possibilities and probabilities of that [purchase] falling into place cannot be explained without God. I called it Agape Organic Farms because of the unconditional love of God. Even in the suffering that God has given me, he has also given me continual points of consolation to let me know that his hand is upon me.”

Shara says her parish priest and spiritual director, Father Mike Murray of St. Martha’s in Okemos, has been a wonderful guide through her years of difficulty, especially because he was married and worked as lawyer before becoming widowed and entering priestly life. 

“He came from the corporate world,” she says. “He understands me and where I’m coming from.” 

Shara says she has had wonderful support for her farm from some neighbors and other farmers like Steve and Bridget Tennes, who own the Country Mill. Shara and Bridget met with a hug during the Sign of Peace at Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. 

“That was actually the start of a very great friendship,” Shara says. “It was God-made. After Mass, she and her husband started helping me, supporting me, and reaching out to make sure I was okay.” 

In addition to raising organic pigs, Shara also grows and sells more than 20 varieties of gourmet mushrooms. She was recently accepted into the National Minor Supplier Development Council’s program called Acres: Growing the Future of Agriculture, which will support her in new efforts to raise wholesale sows and create mushroom-based seasoning blends for cooking. 

“God’s lining up everything that I need,” she says.

Additionally, she has begun a cooking and advice video blog, called On the Farm with Shara, which she posts on social media — she says it is “Catholic teaching in an approachable way for the secular world.”

Like the story of seeing one’s life as a woven tapestry from the back side on which we only see the knots, Shara says she must just remember to come around to the other side of the fabric and see the beautiful picture God is creating.

“My life has been messy, but in it God has been able to weave a tapestry of love and grace.”