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JG: So you are in seminary and you decide, at, during your last year, that you are going to take the plunge, I guess you could call it, and become ordained. What does your family think about this?

MN: Well, it's interesting. It's kinda funny. When I first decided to even apply for seminary, I disguised it by telling my folks I was gonna, I want to do social work, and then when they realized what I was really doing, then they said, "Do you know what you're doing?" They asked me, "Do you know what you're doing? Do you know what this is gonna mean? How you gonna be able to survive? How you gonna be able to eat?" All this. But I noticed, though, not even after I became ordained and was in my first church, even when I was going through my last year of seminary, on a couple of trips I had taken to come back home, my mom would, I would hear my mom start to use the phrase to her friends, "My son's a minister." [Laughs] So I guess, it was also, I thought to myself, "Gosh, three years ago I know they really didn't think much of me going into seminary. Now it's 'my son, the minister.'" So I figured that was progress, and so that whole transformation happened. Their transformation happened along with my transformation as well, and yeah, I've never forgotten that at all.

JG: Did your, what did your friends think about you becoming a minister?

MN: You know, for the most part, they were very supportive. There were a few that said, "What?" or "What happened?" but for the most part, they were very supportive. And I see a lot of 'em, since I've been back in L.A. for the last fifteen years and I've reconnected with a lot of folks who were, I were away from for about ten or so years, and we all kind of have been keeping abreast of what everybody's doin' and yeah, they all sound very supportive and very, very positive.

JG: Were you dating Pam at this point?

MN: No, 'cause I didn't meet her until after I'd started, after I'd gotten assigned to the church in Sacramento, and even then it wasn't until about, a number of years after that.

JG: Okay, so she didn't factor into your...

MN: Oh, no. No, no way. In fact, around the time when we were getting married, I said to her, I'm sure other people said to her, too, "You know what you're getting into? You're gonna be a minister's wife, and so you know what this is gonna mean?" And she would say, "Yeah, I know." So that, that's always given me an excuse that if anything should ever happen, if... I always kind of jokingly said to her, "Look, if we ever decide to divorce you can't say you didn't know what you were gettin' into." [Laughs] It's not like we got married during seminary, not knowing what we were gonna get into and then that caused hardship on the marriage, which unfortunately did happen to some of my classmates. But I said, "You have no excuses. You know who you're marrying. You know who you're marrying, you know what kind of person you're marrying, so you'll have no excuses afterwards." But no, she had no factor into my decision, into ultimately my going into the ministry, because we met, it wasn't until after that that we met.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.