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Chapter One

Prelude to a Journey

One winter afternoon, I found myself on the campus of Louisville Seminary attending the funeral of my beloved uncle, Don. After his funeral, we buried his ashes behind the chapel with a marker saying, “Courage that perseveres.” It had been more than twenty years since I had been in a church, but in that chapel, I felt something familiar. Something I hadn’t felt for a long time.

After leaving the chapel the day of the funeral, I experienced some of the most turbulent years of my life. In 1997, I lost my job of eighteen years while working at a large suburban hospital. During my time there, I served as Administrative Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and opened two psychiatric units and a therapeutic day school. Later, after receiving my MBA from Northwestern University, I served as Director of Quality Management, bringing the hospital the distinction of being named one of the top 100 hospitals in the United States.

When the hospital abruptly eliminated my job, I found myself lost in a sea of despair at the middle of what seemed like a successful career. The stirrings and rumblings of God’s spirit, always present but generally hidden from my view, began to set in motion longings I had ignored in my pursuit of a successful career. I didn’t listen right away. I still had my nose pointed to the ground, determined to fulfill my career aspirations. With those aspirations firmly in hand, I took a position of manager in the healthcare practice of Ernst & Young.

When I took that position, the partner who interviewed me commented that she wasn’t sure I would fit into the culture of the firm. She observed that I had been a social worker and that my prior work was “helping people.”

“That’s not what we do here,” she said.

But I was determined to fit in.

I didn’t, but clients responded well to me, so I stuck with it. Then one night, I received some news that knocked me off my feet. I came back to the hotel after a long day at the client site. It was near midnight and I still hadn’t picked up my voicemail. I rang up the firm’s voicemail and was greeted with the words, “You have fifty-three unheard messages.” I paced back and forth as I listened to the minutia of mail the firm had sent. Then came message seven. It was a nurse at the hospital in my hometown of Chester, Illinois.

“Your father has died,” she said.

I collapsed on the floor, my head between my legs, sobbing.

The next day I left for Chester. When I drove into the small town of my youth, I walked into the funeral home, not knowing anything about what I needed to do. My parents were divorced, and my sister was estranged from Dad. I had never spoken to him about funeral arrangements. I was alone here, or so I thought.

As I walked into the funeral home, a woman from Dad’s church (the church where I grew up) greeted me. She was a deacon. Joan stayed with me every step of the way. We navigated decisions about cremation, the memorial service, contacting family members, and obtaining the will. She was there for the funeral. Dad’s funeral brought together family members who hadn’t spoken with one another for years.

On the day of his funeral service, I walked down the narrow stairs of the church where I grew up to the church basement and saw long tables of pies, fruit, chicken, and potatoes. The church had prepared a meal for all of us. Finally, I felt like I was home. Before I left, I gave the deacon who had helped me Dad’s car so she and her husband would have a reliable vehicle to drive while they did their deacon work. After that day, I was back to church for good.

I left Ernst & Young later that year to work for the Good Samaritan Society, a faith-based organization in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. While working there, I found myself surrounded by persons of faith who were putting their faith in action every day. Their work, which Lutherans refer to as vocation, was seamlessly woven into their faith. The word “vocation” comes from the word vocare, which means “to call.” In that sacred place, the word “call” became an urgent and personal experience for me. It was the place where I began to sense a call to ministry.

Sense of call is what church people call this urgent need to follow wherever God leads. We don’t presume to know that God called us. We only say we seem to sense that urging. My sense of call became so distracting that on one occasion I left my desk in the middle of the day, went back to my room in the central office building where I lived and fell on my knees in a tortured prayer where I finally said yes to God, but not without some fist shaking and a determined cry, “One day I will see you!”

Later that year, I was walking with my dear friend Cally on a forest preserve trail near my home in Chicago. In those days, I was a person who preferred to listen and enjoyed being with someone who could carry the conversation. Cally was a person who loved to talk. During a pause in our conversation, I gathered up my courage and said to her, “Cally, I believe God might be calling me to be a pastor.”

We kept walking in silence for almost twenty minutes. Finally, I broke the silence.

“Do you have any reaction to this?”

After a few more moments she said, “I think it sounds right. Look at your life so far. You have always wanted to serve others. This step makes sense based on who you are and how you have lived your life so far.”

Then I told her about a dream I had that week.

I was climbing a high mountain. When I came to a precipice at the top, I looked out over the whole world. I was on top of the world, for a moment. As soon as I took in that glorious sight, I became blind. I felt my feet below me sliding on the rocks on that tiny perch at the top. I got down on my hands and knees, determined to crawl my way down. Along the way I found a stick I used to test the patch of rocks ahead of me. Then, I heard a voice.

“I can help you get down.”

I ignored it. But the voice continued and the sense of the presence of someone beside me was very strong.

“If you let me help you get down, we can go together. I can see the way. You won’t be alone.”

I clung to my stick for dear life.

“Take my hand,” the voice said. “Let go of the stick and take my hand.”

“Did you take the hand?” Cally asked.

“Yes, I did. And I heard that stick hit the rocks as it went down, down, down that mountain.”

Cally’s belief that I might be called to ministry was the only positive feedback I heard among those who knew me. To most everyone else, it looked like I had fallen off the cliff of a successful career. I was told I must be having a mid-life crisis. I needed to think this thing through.

A chaplain at the hospital where I had worked said, “Did you say you want to serve a church?”

He just shook his head in disbelief. What was I thinking? So many people believed my going into ministry was a mistake, I was tempted to forsake the whole thing. Cally’s encouragement was part of what kept me in the game.

The pastor of my home church cautiously supported my sense of call. But she had some stern words.

“Don’t go into ministry unless you find it is the only thing you can do in your life. Only go there when nothing else seems right.” Then I told her I was spending a large portion of my days looking at seminary websites. She simply said, “Well, there you are.”

Then came one last surprise. When I was packing the house to leave, I called my mother.

I put off that call until the last minute because I didn’t believe she would approve of my decision to become a pastor. She was a Southern Baptist, and in her tradition, women could not become pastors. But Mom had a surprise of her own. She told me a story she had never told anyone.

When I was only a few months old, Mom attended a retreat with Dad. She left me home at the cottage with Dad and went to a church service on campus. In the service, the minister asked if anyone present would dedicate a child of theirs to mission work. Mom stood up. She never told anyone, not my Dad, a minister, a family member—no one! In those days, mission work was dangerous. Many missionaries didn’t survive their journeys to foreign lands. Mom had waited for me for a long time. I was her first-born. She didn’t know if she would have another child.

Her dedication that night was a huge risk. And a huge secret.

“Didn’t you want to give up?” I asked her. I hadn’t gone to church for almost twenty-five years. I will always remember her response.

“Sometimes these things take longer than we would wish.”

Six years after the funeral in the chapel at Louisville Seminary, when I was fifty years old, I became a student there.

Ministry is a call. To all those folks who scratch their heads when a person with a successful career drops everything and goes into ministry, I offer my story. God calls people to do all sorts of things, not just ordained ministry. Have you had an experience where you called a friend and later that friend told you, “How did you know I needed so much to talk today?” God taps ordinary people on the shoulder every day, urging them to do something or say something no one else can do or say. Pastors aren’t the only people who are called. We all are.

That sense of call was the reason I moved to Louisville in 2001. On the Sunday after my arrival in Louisville, I walked from my recently purchased house to the campus. Before going inside, I walked behind the chapel to see the marker of my uncle’s grave and read again those words, “Courage that perseveres.” Then I walked inside. Morgan saw me.

But I didn’t see him. I was awash with all that had happened the week I left my home in Chicago. I had sat in the pew of my home church for the last time. In that service, we were invited to take a stone from a basket and hold it during the service. I took two more stones as I left the sanctuary, and I continue to keep them in the cupholder of my car. When I get behind the wheel, I sometimes glance at those stones or hold one in my hand before I put the car in gear.

As I walked into the chapel when Morgan saw me, I was thinking about the day before. The moving truck was scheduled to arrive at my house at 9 a.m. That same morning, I had a new piano delivered and the old piano taken away. Since the new piano didn’t need to be moved all the way inside of the house, I left it outside on the sidewalk (no threat of rain that day). The moving truck was hours late. My good friend Margaret showed up to help while I was playing the piano on the sidewalk of my front yard. Neighbors gathered around me, even dogs stopped by to listen! By the time the moving truck arrived and was loaded, it was 4 p.m. and we were over five hours from Louisville. Because of these delays, the truck would not arrive in Louisville until after midnight and would not be unloaded until the following morning. When I set out for Louisville along with the moving van, I had to pack another bag so I would have food and clothing to bring with me to the empty house that awaited me.

That was one long drive. By the time I arrived in Louisville, it was dark. I could not read the print on the street signs in the neighborhood. It was midnight before I found the driveway of my new home. I shuffled through my glove box, finally finding a flashlight. Then I couldn’t get the key to work in the realtor box. Finally, I was inside at last. I pulled my sleeping bag out of the car and curled up in the bag on the carpet in the basement of my new house, leaving on the light, just in case.

The next day I walked to the chapel. The moving van had unloaded everything that morning. I unpacked my travel bag, took a shower, and put on my travel clothes. Morgan noticed the hiking boots and day pack I had in tow the day I walked into the chapel. He told himself that day, “this one is a sojourner.” I had a house full of boxes still unpacked. I literally didn’t know where I was going, which was why I walked to the chapel that day instead of driving. I didn’t want to get lost the next day, the first day of classes.