By Sh. Kim Whiteside
The Rev. Dn. John Whiteside is entering his third year of study in the M.Div. Program at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. He was ordained to the Holy Diaconate by His Eminence Metropolitan Saba on December 7, 2025, at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church of Little Falls, NJ.
This reflection by his wife Sh. Kim was first published in the Summer 2026 E-Bulletin of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Women of North America. Below is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Antiochian Archdiocese website by clicking here.
Four years ago my husband John and I, along with our two youngest children, moved from Texas to Tennessee. We had no idea that two years later we would be loading a U-Haul and moving again, this time to New York, to St. Vladimir's Seminary. …
Just the other day, I was telling a friend whose husband just graduated, and is waiting for his permanent assignment, how you cannot anticipate the wild ride that life is when you say yes to God, particularly when it involves a path to the Priesthood. Beautiful, wonderful things will happen, but oh, so does the suffering, the difficulty, the truly confounding. The evil one pulls out all the stops to discourage you, to make you afraid, to make you despair, and give up. I could share a lot of stories, both my own and others,’ but I will leave those for another day. In the end, we received a blessing, and eleven months after saying “Yes, God, we will follow you wherever you want us to go,” we were headed to Yonkers, New York, to St. Vladimir's Seminary.
We sold our beautiful home and sold or gave away many of our possessions. We felt like we had downsized a lot and were ready to move into our seminary apartment. When we arrived, a group of adults and kids descended upon us, and had our truck unloaded within thirty minutes or so. When they were done, we were left with a small apartment filled to the brim with our already much-culled possessions. It felt like a game of Tetris at the very top of the screen, when you know you’re about to lose the round. There was hardly an open space to move something in order to put something else where you wanted it. If I had it to do over again, I would definitely bring even less stuff, but we got to work unpacking, organizing, and, yes, giving away a lot (thankfully there are plenty of people on campus who usually want what you are offering). Just a few days later John was off to the yearly seminarian retreat at Antiochian Village, and thus began the intense pace of seminary life. …
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