Jennifer Middleton, M.D., knew she wanted to be a doctor by the time she was 10 years old.
"I really fell in love with the idea of being a doctor when I was quite young," she said.
That call led her through medical school at The Ohio State University, a family medicine residency and fellowship in Pittsburgh, and eventually back to Columbus in 2014 to practice at OhioHealth. But underneath the busy rhythm of clinical life, another call, quieter at first, kept resurfacing.
It came into sharp focus in 2023, after the death of a close friend from cancer. Driving home from the funeral in Cincinnati, Middleton found she didn't want the radio on.
"I just needed it to be quiet," she said. When she walked through the door, her husband asked how everything had gone. "I said, 'I'm going to seminary.' And he was a little taken aback by that pronouncement."
That two-hour drive of silence, layered on top of years of reflection accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, set Middleton on a new path: enrolling part-time at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in the fall of 2024, with a hoped-for graduation in spring 2029.
Middleton's call is a specific one: to serve healthcare workers, a population she describes as spiritually underserved.
"I was feeling a call to serve healthcare workers specifically after knowing what I lived through, what a lot of my colleagues lived through during that time," she said. The pandemic, in her view, exposed fractures that had long existed.
"Our healthcare system is not only irrevocably broken regarding the care it's providing to patients, but for the people who are providing that care as well,” Middleton said.
She hopes to be part of rebuilding a system that "preserves the humanity and dignity of every person within it, patients and the people providing the care."
At Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University, Middleton is pursuing the Word and Service track of the Master of Divinity, a path she describes as "one foot in the church, one foot in the world,” rather than the Word and Sacrament track most of her peers follow. She points to a required course, Intro to Worship, as an unexpected turning point. Taught by Dr. Kerstin Hedlund, the class pushed her to reconsider assumptions she'd carried into the program.
"It was incredibly relevant to the kind of things that I want to do," Middleton said, "to really have my perspective broadened on how many different kinds of ways there are to worship, how many different kinds of ways there are to express that spirituality."
Perhaps most striking is how Middleton describes her classmates.
"To interact and hear questions answered, to have conversations with people who are coming from different backgrounds, who are so willing to bravely share their stories and their experiences, is very humbling," she said.
For Middleton, medicine and ministry aren't separate callings so much as two expressions of the same one, a commitment to walking alongside people, as she puts it, "through the joys and through the challenges in their life."