When The Rev. Dr. Robin Reed receives her anticipated ordination to the priesthood and installation as rector of St. Francis of Assisi Anglican Episcopal Church, Lake Placid, in August 2021, she will end one journey and begin another. But for this Navy veteran, wife, mother, clinical psychologist, soon-to-be-seminary graduate and more, this new journey marks the fulfillment of a vision God planted in her heart long ago.

Unchurched as a child, Reed met Jesus at summer camp during her teens, spending years in other denominations. In her profession as a psychologist, “Over time, as I realized how important my relationship with God was, I began to wonder how I was working with all these patients, but we couldn’t talk about God in our offices,” she said. She eventually did postdoctoral work in pastoral care, serving at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, as a therapist for seminarians and their spouses.

God used her time there to draw her into The Episcopal Church, where, “the doors just started opening for me, and I was invited closer and closer to the altar,” Reed said. That’s where she first recognized her calling to the priesthood. But when her first marriage ended and later, her sponsoring priest in Tennessee took medical retirement, that calling went on hold.

In 2016, God made a way for her to move to Central Florida, closer to both her mother in Melbourne and youngest daughter, then a student at Rollins College. She had already spoken with The Rev. Canon Dr. Justin Holcomb, who encouraged her to come to the diocese.

Not long after she arrived for her job at the Veterans Affairs Clinic in Orange City, a friend who served at Church of the Resurrection in Longwood invited her to attend. “I walked into that parish, and I knew that I had come home,” Reed said. She became active there, entered the discernment process and started at Asbury Theological Seminary.

Working fulltime and taking only a few hours of coursework each semester, Reed remained on a slow track to ordination. But Mike Brown, who is now her husband, told her early in their relationship that “You really need to go [to seminary] full time.” The two became engaged in November 2018, and that December, two different priests within a week urged her to consider a residential seminary program.

By August of 2019, Reed was both married and a full-time student at Virginia Theological Seminary, her tuition miraculously covered through a VA program in which she had invested. “I was able to come in as a middler, a second-year student,” she said. She did a contextual ministry class at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Bethesda, Maryland, staying on afterward as a pastoral intern. She served for six months pre-COVID, but since then, “I’ve learned how important technology is and being able to work platforms, to use Facebook,” she said.

At the VA, “I wanted my patients … at least to be able to have a spiritual or faith practice,” Reed said. But she wasn’t allowed to speak about spiritual matters unless the patient initiated the conversation. In church work, her chaplaincy and shepherding gifts have found a God-ordained fit.

Throughout her transitional ministry, “Canon Scott Holcombe has been a wonderful, wonderful mentor for me,” she said. After a process that has included Zoom interviews and two visits to Florida, she accepted the call to St. Francis, where she will begin service June 15 as pastor in charge.

“I’m looking forward to returning to Central Florida,” Reed said. “I’m also looking forward to a new part of Florida and really getting to know this congregation and seeing where God is at work and might be calling us to work together. … I love to say it’s a journey of being and becoming. We’re all called to be and to become as God invites us, transformed and transforming by the Holy Spirit.”