MUSCATINE, Iowa — Charlene Shoppa serves up a side dish of faith with the affordable clothes and household goods she sells at her downtown Muscatine consignment shop.

“I love to share my testimony,” said Shoppa after she finished speaking with a young mother-to-be who was shopping with a toddler in tow. “It builds me up and it builds them up.”

There was a time when Shoppa was on the receiving end of the kind of encouragement she gives out.

She saw some dark days after enduring abuse as a child and searching futilely as an adult for two pre-school age sons who disappeared with her second ex-husband in 1969.

Today, at 62, she’s overcome food addiction, alcoholism and despair, and wants to share the Christian  faith that changed her life.

Her desire to help others was first answered when she helped a friend open  faith-based homeless shelters in the Quad-Cities.

Shoppa moved back to her childhood hometown of Muscatine in 2005, after living in different parts of the United States during her adulthood, and established a new life.

With the assistance of her “adopted” daughter, Sonia Flores, she opened the Faith Haven Consignment Store at 225 E. Second St. in Muscatine in May 2008.

Since then, she has become an ordained pastor, and delivers Christian church services in the chapel in the back of her store at 5:30 p.m. on Saturdays.

In both situations, she hands out large measures of encouragement and hope to those who come to shop and worship.

Shoppa is a living example of the rewards of perseverance.

In 1989, the sons she had lost found her. Shoppa is the mother of six sons, and has been able to bring all but one of them together since then.

Eight years ago, her desire to understand the Bible helped her overcome the learning disability that held her back as a child.

“I was 16 years old and in the sixth grade,”  Shoppa said. “I could not read.”

Shoppa said the motto for Faith Haven Consignment Store, “Faith Makes all things possible,” describes her life.

“God opened up the doors,” she said.

Details

What: Faith Haven Consignment Store

Owner: Charlene Shoppa

Where: 225 E. Second St., Muscatine

Contact: 571-6217

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.