Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have always considered being a minister. I am not sure what drew me to this career. I grew up Catholic, but left the church before my confirmation. This decision was partially based on the lack of leadership roles for women within the Catholic Church. I spent the next few years looking for a new church within the community, but I never found a real home. Every time I found a minister I respected, that person would take a position elsewhere, retire or get fired for "inappropriate behavior," as the church bulletin so delicately phrased it. In many senses, I did not have a home for my spirituality.

While in theory a church was a wonderful, welcoming community, I had never been a part of a community I could count on. This could at times be a lonely way to experience God, but it taught me to examine my own beliefs for the moral and spiritual principles that were truths for me. I had to block out all the messages coming from other people in order to hear my own voice shine through.

I received an e-mail from Lucy Forster-Smith, the chaplain at Macalester College and co-director of the Lilly Grant, about the opportunities the Lilly Grant offered, including funding for students wishing to visit and/or enroll in a seminary class. I was on the verge of deleting the e-mail—after all the unfulfilling church experiences in my hometown, I figured the last occupation I would ever want to enter was the ministry. However, I had a nagging feeling inside that I should pay attention to the e-mail and find out more about the Lilly Grant.

I kept thinking over the idea of ministry, and realized that taking a seminary class was the best way to really get an idea of whether ministry would even be an option for me. While I knew graduate level work would be challenging and perhaps even uncomfortable, I needed to give it a chance. I enrolled in Christie Neuger's "Introduction to Pastoral Care" class at United Theological Seminary in the fall of my senior year.

I walked into class the first day a little nervous. The last thing I wanted to do was to stick out in the class, but I soon realized that I did. I was the youngest person in the room by at least 10 years, and everyone else seemed so much more amply qualified to be a minister. The woman sitting next to me had two masters degrees and a doctorate in psychotherapy, was a registered nurse, had counseled children facing severe emotional and physical abuse for 20 years. She still found time to attend protest rallies and visit shut-ins in her congregation twice a week. I felt a little out of my league.

The assignments for the class were very challenging as well. I am really used to the average Macalester assignment—going to a library, reading lots of books, and writing a paper. Knowledge from a book is interesting, but there is still a certain amount of detachment from the information. The seminary assignments, while stressing academics, also stressed practicality. One of my assignments was to actually make a pastoral care visit to someone and then write a report about the visit. Not only was I reading about pastoral care, but I also had to practice it—with people, who were in the same room, expecting me to act like a pastor. While I walked into my first class a little nervous, I walked out terrified.

As the weeks went by, I slowly became comfortable in the class. The whole class was incredibly supportive, caring and kind. They listened when someone needed to speak, they processed the course material even when things got tough, and above all, they were striving to become better human beings. Ministry is an all-consuming profession, and they helped to carry each other through difficult times. This was the spiritual community I had been searching for my entire life.

About ten weeks into the class, I had an epiphany. I was writing a paper about how domestic abuse is typically handled by ministers within the realm of pastoral care. To my horror, I found that the vast majority of ministers handled this situation badly. I read case after case of women who were beaten to the point of hospitalization time and time again, and the ministers either remained silent or preached to the abuse victim the sanctity of marriage. One minister told a teenage girl who had been sexually abused by her father for years that she should go and apologize to her father for her part in the sexual act.

I was infuriated. Even ministers who thought domestic abuse was inappropriate claimed that they were "theologically torn" about what to tell domestically abused congregants. Frozen in their indecision, these ministers were proving unhelpful to the one in three women who will be abused in their lifetimes.

I sat in my apartment practically yelling at the articles I was reading. I would occasionally read sections out loud to my roommate in disgust, unable to contain my frustration with a tradition that was re-silencing women. I finally turned to my roommate and said, "THIS is why I need to be a minister, if for no other reason than this, I need to be an advocate for people who are silenced. I need to listen when no one else will, I need to speak out against hatred and abuse in sermons, and if I can make a difference in even one person's life, my entire career will be worth it. I need to be a minister!"

In one shining flash of clarity, I saw my path before me. I was shown bad examples of ministers as a child so that I could know how much damage a minister was capable of doing within a congregation and I was given the gift of a community within my seminary class to show me how much good could be done in the world by a minister.

In the seminary class, I found more than a profession—I found a vocation. For me, ministry is more than just a job. It is more than a paycheck. It is my life's work.