Ashley's Story: The Long Way to a Calling

Some people find their calling early and walk a straight line toward it.

That is not Ashley's story.

On Episode 6 of Shut Up and Love Your Neighbor, Pastor Ashley sat down for a conversation that ranged from a teenage rebellion in South Florida to musical theater in New York City to a quiet seminary classroom — and somehow makes complete sense once you hear how it unfolded.

Ashley grew up in the church. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she has talked openly about how that shaped her — the sense of living on an island, the way it later made her notice when other people were quietly carrying something heavy.

In high school her family moved to South Florida, where her stepdad was a pastor. The new community was more diverse than what she knew. She had been raised in a conservative church culture where there were things you simply did not do, and the implicit promise was that doing them might end with you catching on fire.

Her friends weren't catching on fire.

She started asking questions.

For a while those questions led her in directions she now describes plainly. She did "all the things" she had been told not to do, looking for evidence one way or the other. The only person who got hurt was her. She lost sight of who she was and what she actually cared about. The lostness, in a strange way, started to answer the question she had been asking. The rules weren't arbitrary. They had been protecting her from exactly the kind of erosion she was now experiencing.

What pulled her out wasn't a sermon or a rulebook.

It was people.

People who didn't owe her anything came alongside her. They spoke life into her. They were patient. They didn't try to fix her. They just kept showing up.

That thread runs through everything Ashley does now. Love, in her experience, has almost always shown up as another person who refused to walk past her.

She started college as a vocal performance major, then switched to musical theater. After graduating she moved to London, and then to New York City at twenty-three, chasing the dream every musical theater grad chases.

She auditioned for a year.

Then a quieter realization started to surface.

What she was pursuing had nothing to do with the calling she had felt as a kid.

So she walked away from theater.

Then her mother got sick. Her stepdad died, suddenly. She moved to Northern Virginia to be with family. Other voices, as she puts it, started speaking into her life. She went to seminary thinking she was being called to music ministry. A year in, the picture sharpened — she was being called to ordained ministry. That was 2009.

Thirteen years later, here she is.

There is a moment near the end of the conversation where Ashley talks about a seminary trip to Memphis. Her class spent two weeks living in an underserved part of the city. She met a woman who had worked for a doctor her whole life, saved her money instead of spending it on herself, and used it to buy a house in that neighborhood. Once a week, the woman opened her doors and served a meal. Eventually that one weekly meal became a full organization — afterschool programs, an art gallery, a cafe where you could pay if you could and eat free if you couldn't.

A few blocks away, a doctor and his six kids moved into the same neighborhood on purpose. He opened his home one day a month as a free clinic.

Ashley said something in that part of the conversation that has stuck.

We can forget how easy it is to love a neighbor.

We can also forget that sometimes love asks us to do something a lot harder than easy — to step way outside our own neighborhood and into someone else's.

Both are true. Both matter.

That is what Episode 6 ends up being about.

It is about a long, non-linear path to a calling.

It is about the people who refuse to walk past someone in their lostness.

And it is about how love often shows up in steady ones — a meal, a wave, a conversation, a single woman buying a house in a neighborhood she didn't have to.

Pastor Ashley is doing that, every day.

This is her story.