For a long time, I’ve held to a belief I first latched onto when I read Inferno by Dante Alighieri in high school. The belief came from a passage in which Dante enters the First Circle of Hell: Limbo. In Limbo Dante encounters a bunch of good and smart folks like Homer, Socrates, and Aristotle. These people were virtuous in life but lacked faith in their lives as well. In this place of Limbo these virtuous people are all enjoying themselves but are kept out of heaven basically because in life before and after death they are limited by their own logic and conceptions in the world instead of being open to greater wonders than they could have ever conceived. Heaven is not out of reach for them but they are limited by relying only on their own experiences, so they do not reach for heaven. 

My belief that stemmed from this passage is heaven is too grand and vast for us to experience on this earth, it is beyond human experience and comprehension.

But something happened a few months ago. I was getting ready to put my daughter Gwennie to bed and we started dancing to some music. I was holding her in my arms and moving back and forth when I asked her if she wanted me to spin her around. She nodded in approval. We started spinning around, she closed her eyes and smiled. As we were spinning the whole world around us became blurry and all I could see clearly was Gwennie, smiling and at peace, the air lifting her hair as she trusted me completely to keep her safe as she spun around and around.

I realized in that moment is that Dante had it wrong. Heaven can be experienced here in this life, on this Earth because that moment along many other moments I’ve had with Gwennie and my wife Susanna and the feeling that came with those moments was certainly heaven. 

When I first felt my call to pastoral ministry, I wasn’t a husband or a father. I didn’t realize how called I’d feel to take advantage of being present for as many moments with my family as possible and how the evening meetings and weekend commitments of pastoral ministry would conflict with that call.

When my wife and I started pondering a move abroad it came with the question of what I would do. There are certainly churches that need pastors outside of the United States, but I found myself feeling not enthusiastic about exploring pastoral opportunities in the UK. I felt more enthusiastic about being in a job in which I can work set hours during weekdays, come home and be with my family. A job that doesn’t give me my beloved 15 minutes of speaking words of my faith into a microphone each week but gives me a little more time in heaven here on Earth.

There are plenty of clergy, who are wonderful parents, who can be fulfilled in family and work life, I just found that I’m not one of them.

This past Sunday was my last Sunday as a pastor and clergy person. After an almost 10-year journey through the seminary and ordination process I’ve ended this part of my journey less than a year away from potentially being fully ordained. Even though I found this wasn’t for me in the long term I don’t regret the decision I made to pursue this as a career in 2013. While in this process I have grown tremendously as a person and in my own faith, I connected with my now wife, and I have met and been blessed by an exorbitant amount of incredible people. 

All of this and so much more that I don’t have time to list has prepared me for this next phase of life in which, while I won’t be a pastor, I still plan to live out my faith, to love God, neighbor and self. I just plan to do that while being able to be more present with my absolutely awesome family and soaking in all of the heavenly family moments I can with the time I have.

So as of today I’m no longer a clergy person, but I’m still a person living out my call. For the ability to do that I am happy and grateful as my family and I move into this new chapter of our story, a chapter that I hope will include a little more time in heaven.