Believing that her future was in the ministry, Kristen Carlone Hurley saw a future in divinity school with a husband and kids somewhere in the Northeast. When her faith was shaken a bit by personal relationships, the path seemed less certain. After regrouping, she took opportunities as they came, no matter how divergent from the original ideal. Ultimately where she landed diverged quite a bit. Find out how sometimes exercising faith means knowing you'll find something good where it is, not necessarily where you thought it would be.
Believing that her future was in the ministry, Kristen Carlone Hurley saw a future in divinity school with a husband and kids somewhere in the Northeast. When her parents blindsided her with the news of their divorce in just before her junior year and she was going through relationship issues of her own, her faith was shaken. She dealt with a period of depression and first put the divinity school on hold until she realized she needed another path. After regrouping, she took opportunities as they came, no matter how divergent from the original ideal. Ultimately where she landed diverged quite a bit.
In this episode, find out from Kristen how sometimes exercising faith means knowing you'll find something good where it is, not necessarily where you thought it would be…on today's Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Kristen Carlone Hurley followed opportunities as they came about, ultimately finding herself in the financial sector. She lives in Florida with her husband, enjoying the sunshine and living her bliss.
For another story about faith taking you to unexpected places, listen to our episode with Michelle Erickson Waters.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Kristen Carlone Hurley: But it really, it did, it affected everything. I had pretty much set my sights at that point on going to the ministry, and it ended up, the separation and the aftermath kind of rocked my faith in ways that I hadn't expected.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Believing that her future was in the ministry, Kristen Carlone Hurley saw a future in divinity school with a husband and kids somewhere in the Northeast. When her faith was shaken a bit by personal relationships, the path seemed less certain. After regrouping, she took opportunities as they came, no matter how divergent from the original ideal. Ultimately where she landed diverged quite a bit. Find out how sometimes exercising faith means knowing you'll find something good where it is, not necessarily where you thought it would be...on today's Roads Taken with me Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I am here today with Kristen Carlone Hurley, and we are going to talk about ways that our selves, our values, our faith might play out in interesting ways in our lives. So Kristen, thanks so much for being here.
KH: Absolutely excited to be here.
LJR: So I start this the same way with each of my guests asking two questions and I will do the same with you. When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
KH: Ha ha. Leading questions. Yes. So I was. Entering Dartmouth. Very shy, introverted, driven in a certain respect, but didn't really know where that would take me. I had a lot of different interests and I thought Dartmouth was a great place to explore that. When I left, I was in a much different place. My parents separated. Sorry, it's just hard for me to talk about right before junior year and changed everything.
LJR: Had you seen that coming?
KH: No. Yeah. No. Complete shock, but it really, it did, it affected everything. I had pretty much set my sights at that point on going to the ministry, and it ended up, the separation and the aftermath kind of rocked my faith in ways that I hadn't expected. So, you know, I work in finance. So completely, completely different than anything I had anticipated ever doing with my life. And again, you know, not a bad thing, just completely not where I saw myself going.
LJR: Yeah. So it sounds as though the faith piece was a huge part of your life prior to even coming to college.
KH: Yes.
LJR: But that continued throughout. You were able to maintain communities of faith at Dartmouth.
KH: Mm-hmm. Yep. I was involved in the Lutheran community at Dartmouth. I interned with Gwen King and the Tucker Foundation senior year, which was amazing, which gave me access to, you know, a lot of different faith groups and has really kind of informed my—I don't wanna say my faith journey—but I don't, I think I have a lot more openness, if you will, to people of different faiths and, you know, acknowledgement of more of the similarities than focusing on the differences.
LJR: So in junior year though, when you had your site set on ministry, what did you think the path was gonna look like? Like day one after graduation?
KH: So Divinity School, you know, master's in divinity. I had a couple of different programs that I was interested in, that I applied to, I was accepted to.
LJR: Oh, already by, by junior?
KH: Not, not, no, not junior year, but senior year. I mean, I was still on that path. Ready to go. And I was like, okay, I am gonna be a Lutheran minister. I had a very serious HTH.
LJR: HomeTown Honey.
KH: Yeah, he was…we were still together at the beginning of junior year. He was gonna be a teacher. I was gonna be a minister. We kind of had everything planned out and, and we weren't sure if that meant going back to our hometown or you know, he was in school in New Hampshire as well. So like, maybe we stay up here, but you know, we were on a good trajectory, you know, marriage, kids, the whole thing and yeah.
LJR: Wow. Yeah. Okay. So there's a lot to kind of disassemble if you think your world kind of foundation has been crumbling. [KH: Mm-hmm.] So, what does senior over year look like? Or at like the middle part, once you know that there is a path forward on this path that you thought you could take, where do decision points start diverging?
KH: So honestly, they started mid junior year. So by Thanksgiving of junior year, my boyfriend and I were no longer together. I was dating somebody else. And you know, I was still on a good path, but the religion department, the FSP was in Scotland and I was completely gung-ho. And then just decided that because of my family situation, I didn't wanna be that far away. So I didn't do it. I wasn't really going to church as much by then. And my faith was still okay at that point and I was still on track and I was, you know, the ministry is gonna be a good thing. And then I just, the relationship that I was in by mid senior year was not great, and I was kind of flailing by graduation. It kind of all fell apart.
LJR: So had you done corporate recruiting then?
KH: No, no. I was still planning on going to grad school, but I had some serious depression toward the end of senior year and ended up failing a couple of classes senior Spring and didn't graduate on time.
LJR: Ah, okay.
KH: So they let me walk because it was such a last minute thing, but I didn't get my diploma until April of ’97 ’cause I had to go back and take a class that wasn't offered again until winter of the following year. So I had to wait almost a year.
LJR: Wow. Okay.
KH: And then got into a big fight with financial aid because they didn't wanna gimme the loans to finish. And I thought, Okay, well I have the loans already. Is it better for me to have loans for a degree that I haven't completed, or to have an extra, you know, whatever it was, $5,000 to actually have my degree?
LJR: Crazy. Yeah. So at this point then you need to, are you able to defer your graduate programs?
KH: Yes.
LJR: Okay. Okay. And so you know that you have a little time there. You ultimately, I guess, are successful with the financial aid office, get the degree, all of that. So it's just, it's been a year, I'm sure of upheaval and turmoil kind of mentally, but like you probably had some extra moments in there to figure out where you needed to start walking, is that right?
KH: I, yes and no. So my mom was struggling in the aftermath of the divorce and when I knew I had to go back to finish my degree, I was, well, I'll just move back to Rhode Island. I'll move in with my mom. I'll give her some extra support and kind of figure out what I wanna do. So I was working for a really amazing organization in my hometown that did transitional housing and you know, food bank and clothing bank and, you know, helped people get their GEDs and it was just a really, really robust program that had been started actually by a friend of mine from high school, her mom. So I was working with them and they were super supportive and then went back to Dartmouth and was still dating the guy I had started dating, you know, when my previous relationship fell apart and that was not going well. So we ended up breaking up shortly after I finished my classes and then that just kind of threw another wrench into things and, okay, well I'm not going down that road, so now what do I do?
LJR: And how do you decide at that point?
KH: Yeah, yeah. It was just kind of like, you know, one question after another. And I was temping, I was actually working at the prison in Rhode Island. I was working in the office of the director at the prison, just doing kind of secretarial stuff on a temporary basis and then went and worked at Fidelity and was temping in a, you know, a few different departments with them. And met my now husband through some mutual friends. It was actually funny because he moved to Minnesota and we were just kind of like, okay, well you know, you're gonna do your thing. I'm gonna do my thing. It was fun while it lasted, you know; we're just maybe destined to be good friends. And the longer he was away, the more we started talking and the more we were like, okay, maybe this could be something. So I made the decision spring of 99. To move to Minnesota to be with him. So that really kind of jumpstarted everything that's happened since.
LJR: Right. Okay. So I do wanna get to that, but there was a long period of time between finishing in spring of 97 and spring of 99 moving to Minnesota and you had offers to divinity school that they were willing to keep for you. [KH: Mm-hmm.] You had to have been the one to decide. I'm not doing that.
KH: I did. I did.
LJR: When did that happen? Why did that happen? What did you, did you think that that was closing the door on that? What did it look like?
KH: I did. Part of my inspiration for wanting to take that path in the first place was I had a really amazing minister when I was younger. She started as an associate minister, I wanna say when I was 13, 14, somewhere in that vicinity. But I mean, she was, just the coolest woman. I mean, she had a Brown undergrad, Harvard Divinity, but she would come to youth group in like purple leather pants on a motorcycle. And I was like, this woman is amazing. You know, she was married but she, you know, hyphenated her last name and she had these three kids and it was like, okay, she's working in this traditionally, you know, patriarchal job and she's carving her own path and she's showing me, I mean, she would get up and her sermons were always very personal. And you know, she would talk about, you know, things that were happening in her life and she would relate them to whatever, you know, the scripture was for the day and I was like, this is really amazing. I think her greatest strength was when you would talk to her. She listened. She really, really listened. So she became just a huge mentor for me. I babysat for her kids and we would go to the gym together. She was just like a big sister, and her marriage ended up falling apart partially because of her job.
So after my Dartmouth boyfriend and I broke up, I thought, well, maybe it wouldn't be the best thing if I'm gonna have, you know, a spouse who has a traditional role and we wanna have kids and we wanna try and build this family, maybe that's something that would put too much pressure on the relationship and on the family, and I just decided that it wasn't the right time. And again, I was struggling a bit with my faith just because of watching my parents and my siblings and kind of how that was all going. And I thought maybe this isn't just, it's not the right time. Yeah. Maybe I can do it later, but not now.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so off you go. I will say to a hub of Lutheranism, Minnesota.
KH: Yeah.
LJR: And you've gotten the taste of kind of the financial world, of course, but how does your path get kind of more solidified at this point?
KH: It was really more trial and error than anything. When I went to Minnesota, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. I just, I needed a job, you know, I had to pay my half of the rent and I had to, you know, I had student loans I had to pay, so what am I gonna do to get some income? And I interviewed at a bunch of different places. I interviewed at a bank, and I remember, I mean, they pretty much offered me the job on the spot. And they're like, let's $19,000 a year. Like, yeah, that's not gonna work. No thank you. No. But I was really interested in advertising. And I had an interview with a very prominent firm in Minneapolis and I had thought the interviews were going really well, and I sat down with one of the directors and he was very honest with me and absolutely correct. He said, you are going to struggle in Minnesota because you're not from here. He said, it's a very insular society, he said, and they like the people they know. He said, so if you don't have family or high school friends or college friends, you're going to have a hard time finding community here. And he was absolutely right.
So I didn't get that job and I ended up working for a regional brokerage firm and just kind of went from there. I left that job. And my husband was working in inside sales for a tech company, so he's like, oh, you know, I'll just get you, you know, one of my buddies can get you in with his company. So I went and I did inside sales for a couple of years, which was miserable because for an introvert, not a great position to be making outbound cold calls. And then ended up working for a company called American Investors Group, and they had a subsidiary called American Church Mortgage Company. It was a publicly traded real estate investment trust and I went and was kind of working with, it was the CEO and the CFO and me pretty much running this little company. But I was like, well this is kind of a nice intersection of what I've been doing in finance and you know, my religion interests. And I was like, well, this is how I can help kind of, you know, promote the word and further, you know, the religious community by helping these congregations build their churches or, you know, purchase their churches and that sort of thing. And it was really interesting, you know, it was, I had a lot of day-to-day responsibility for interacting with pastors and that sort of thing. So I get to travel to a bunch of different places around the country and meet people and see, you know, where they were building. I remember going to West Virginia and it was the first time I'd ever been to West Virginia and it was this like little parcel of land in the middle of nowhere, but it was beautiful. And I thought, okay, this, like, this is what this job is about. Is this congregation in Nowheresville, West Virginia is gonna have a, you know, beautiful new facility because we're able to help them get financing. And so that, to me, it was very rewarding until it wasn't.
LJR: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Okay. Another one of these shaking the faith thing?
KH: Uhhuh. So my again, it was a very small company and in 2008 my husband and I were planning our wedding. And about a month before the wedding, the president sat us down. He said, listen, you know, things are tough right now. I can either let somebody go or I can cut everybody's salaries by 20%. So he chose to cut everybody's salary and he said, you know, in return I'm gonna give you Fridays off. So I was like, okay, well that's, you know, makes sense. It's a good trade off. But it was really awful timing because we had this wedding that we were paying for. But I stuck it out, wrote it out with him, and then he ended up having to cut us another 25%. [LJR: Oof.] Yeah. And. That was tough. Fortunately, you know, my husband was making decent money and so we were still able to make the mortgage payments and all that stuff, but it made me kind of start thinking, okay, the writing's on the wall here and something's not, it's not gonna go well. I also, there wasn't a lot going on, so I was really bored.
LJR: Yeah. And that was still in Minnesota?
KH: It was still in Minnesota.
LJR: And so true to the word, you hadn't really found your connections in people because [KH: Right.] they were to themselves. Okay.
KH: Yep. You know, I had like some friends here and there. And people, you know, we'd go to dinner or go to a movie once in a while, but I didn't have…I shouldn't say that. I had one very, very good friend who was from Oklahoma. So another transplant.
LJR: Another. Right.
KH: So I ended up leaving the company and started working at Merrill Lynch. And I remember when I was leaving, the president said, he said, you know, I just, I want you to be careful. Because, you know, Bank of America has been struggling and you know, first in first out, you know they're gonna bring you on, but if something happens, you could lose your job. And I was like, okay, but I'm gonna be making more money than I'm making here in the meantime, so I'm gonna rule those dice. And ended up being at Merrill for nine years, eight years, something like that. So, yeah.
LJR: So it, it works out. But it is interesting that that intersection of what you had known, you know, ultimately didn't pan out for you either, right? And so you have to forge your own way all along. Yeah. So where's just the next move take you because you don't stay in Minneapolis forever?
KH: No. So funnily enough, my husband has always wanted to live in Florida. He grew up, we grew up in the same hometown, you know, a few miles away from one another. We, he was a year ahead of me in high school. I didn't know him at all. As a matter of fact, the night we met, we met through mutual friends, and my girlfriend's like, oh, you know, Mike, he played basketball. I’m like, Nope, never seen him in my life. Found out I had a huge crush on one of his best friends at one point, but never had a clue who he was. So we took a trip to Disney with his family. We were here for my 40th birthday. We're at Disney for my 40th birthday. And he had a cousin, still has a cousin, who lives in the area. So after our trip at Disney, we took a few days and came over and stayed with his cousin. And it was, you know, late February. I was getting texts from, from our pet sitter saying that they were getting feet of snow in Minnesota and how lucky it was that we weren't there and we were sitting outside by his cousin's pool watching a movie. And we kind of looked at each other and we're like, this is stupid. Like why we need to live here? Why do we not live here? So that was February and I started at Merrill in Venice, Florida in November of that year. Yeah.
LJR: Nice. Nice. So that was what helped you propel a move. Mm-hmm. And then your husband kind of fell into the groove of things too, and that was almost 10 years ago.
KH: Yeah, eight and a half.
LJR: And so life in finance continues to be fine, right?
KH: Yeah, it's fine. I'm actually, I'm working on a certification now to get my CFA designation. And just a weird thing, I mean, I tested out of taking math at Dartmouth, so I hadn't taken a math class since high school, and now I'm doing all of this, you know, derivative stuff and these, you know, this binomial formula and I'm like, what am I doing?
LJR: Right. Right. So, Kristen, if you went back to, and I'm, it's hard to pick which, which year, because you had kind of different Kristen's in different years of college. But grab bag, take whenever—you pop back in and show the younger one where you are. What do you think she'd say?
KH: I don't know that she would believe it. I never had any aspiration to leave New England. I. I mean, I knew I didn't wanna stay in my hometown my whole life, which, you know, was what made me go away to school. But, you know, I mean, away in New England is relative, right? So in my mind, when I left I was like, oh, it's three hours. You know, like my family can't just pop in and surprise me, which they actually did manage to do on my birthday freshman year, but it's okay. But, you know, I always thought I would have kids and you know, my husband and I weren't able to. So life just looks completely different than anything I ever would've anticipated. So I think she would kind of be like, oh, that's, that's not where we saw things going. But as long as you're happy, it's good.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. That's the question that they always should ask the older version, are you happy? Yeah. And then it's all okay. Yeah. And now you found community in different ways there that you didn't previously, right?
KH: Yeah. You know, it's still interesting to me. My husband is Catholic, and so for a while in Minnesota, we were going to multiple services on Sundays. So we would go to my service and then we would go and get coffee, and then we would go to his service. And that worked really well for us for a while when we moved down here. He was working in golf and so he was working on Sundays. I have never been the person who wants to walk into a room alone for the first time. So we actually don't have faith communities down here and it's something we keep talking about, but you know, just life is life and things happened and we haven't gotten to that point yet, but our neighborhood is fantastic. We love our neighbors. You know, Mike's cousin is nearby. We got family who come down quite a bit, so it's really been a nice change. You know, my family visited when we were in Minnesota, but honestly, who wants to go there for the holidays when it's cold and awful.
LJR: You may never get out.
KH: Exactly. So it's been much better down here. My mom actually came and spent 16 days with us around the holidays this year and you know, my husband was asking if she would ever leave.
LJR: But it's nice to have the option.
KH: Exactly.
LJR: Yeah. Well that's great. So yeah, we love it. Good. And Chris, I think knowing that that younger version of yourself might not believe it, it doesn't make it impossible. And to know that there are different versions of yourself and different seasons for things that you may yet, you know, find a different kind of community when you're ready and it makes sense in the rest of your life. So, I'm just so pleased that you were able to share some of this with us and we'll look forward to hearing where the path takes next. But maybe it'll just stay in the sunshine, is my guess.
KH: I think so, yeah. It would have to be something very drastic to get me to move out of this bliss.
LJR: Alright, well enjoy the bliss.
KH: Thank you.
LJR: That was Kristen Carlone Hurley who followed opportunities as they came about, ultimately finding herself in the financial sector. She lives in Florida with her husband, enjoying the sunshine and living her bliss.
We hope whatever climate surrounds you, you're finding your bliss or at least a comfy place to listen to some great stories. We appreciate our loyal listeners and are thrilled when we acquire new ones, knowing many of you have been turned onto our program through word of mouth. Thank you for keeping the chain going and letting someone know that they can find us wherever they access podcasts or at RoadsTakenShow.com. Follow or subscribe to keep getting new episodes delivered each week, featuring my guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.