I had been depressed for at least a year when I went to my doctor for help and began taking an antidepressant. I came out of the tunnel vision of depression quickly with the help of medication. Almost as soon as I did, I realized it was time to do something new.

I began preaching as a teen age boy in 1976. I began making my living as a minister in 1979. I worked mostly as a pastoral counselor specializing in marriage and family therapy after 1982. I made a good living until moving to Alpharetta, Georgia in 1995. I never had enough clients to make more than a $1000 per month in Georgia despite establishing three new counseling centers in churches and doing a little specialized consulting work on the side.

I left the ministry in 1997 to become an information technology professional and then a financial analyst.

The chair of my ordination committee from 1980 found me in 2010 and asked me to join the board of the Ministering to Ministers Foundation where he was Executive Director. MTM helps ministers who are experiencing personal or professional crisis due to deteriorating congregational relationships or terminations. There were several others on the board whom I knew from my ministerial days.

I enjoyed hanging out with ministers, albeit at our semi-annual board meetings.

One day, four of us from the board went out to an all-you can eat buffet for lunch. I ate my first plate faster than everybody else and was back at the table working on my second when they left to get more food. While they were gone, a big African-American woman with prominent tattoos leaned over from the table next to ours and asked me in a conspiratorial voice, “Is ya’ll preachers?” I said, “Yes ma’am. We are.” She grinned big and said, “I knew it! I knew you was preachers! I’m a church girl. I knew you was preachers.” I grinned back at her.

I don’t remember what year it was that I owned up to being a preacher at the all you can eat buffet, but looking back, I think I returned to the ministry while talking with that happy woman with all the tattoos on her arms.

I still make my living as a financial analyst and would like to keep my job until I turn 80, but you don’t have to make your living as a minister to be a minister. A woman I have known through work for 3 or 4 years asked me today if I would conduct her funeral if I were still alive when the time comes. I said, “Yes. It would be an honor.”

She explained that it was important that any minister who spoke at her funeral should love her and that the only other minister who loved her was already dead and she knew that I loved her.

I had never thought about it before, but I do love her. And that is kind of amazing. We talk maybe 30 minutes per week and what we talk about is mostly chitchat. She tells me about her family and friends and I tell her the funny stories my pastor told on Sunday. And yet I have become her minister and she has become my friend. And it is an honor.