Dcn. Jeff Hurdley

A Whopper – actually, two Whoppers – led Jeff Hurdley to the diaconate.

It was Good Friday 1996 and Hurdley, who had been deeply impacted by his father’s unexpected death and his mother’s sense of peace about it, had decided to fast all day in an effort to impress God.

“I was not walking with the Lord and practicing my faith, and losing my father was deeply unsettling for me,” he said. “I went to my mother’s house and expected her to be devastated, but she had this peace about her. As people came to pay their respects, there was a feeling in the house that was palpable. I remember thinking, ‘This is God.’”

So on Good Friday, the fast began. He was going to read the Bible all day.

“I got to 2 o’clock and I couldn’t take it any longer,” Hurdley said. “I was totally famished, so hungry.”

That’s where the Whoppers come in.

“I gorged myself and realized how pathetic I was, that I couldn’t give a day to the Lord,” he said. “I got down prostrate on the floor and asked Jesus to help me find the Father. At that moment, my life took a major course correction. It was instantaneous. It felt like buckets of joy. It overwhelmed me. I felt like my life was being rearranged. It started the process of coming back to my faith.”

Hurdley wasn’t a practicing Catholic at the time. He and his wife, Christine, and their three daughters were attending a Protestant church. Feeling like something was missing, Hurdley decided to go through the RCIA program, and that experience began his journey back into the Catholic Church.

The retired lawyer for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency began leading Bible studies. People would tell him he should be a deacon. During a retreat at a monastery, he began to have a sense of peace about exploring the diaconate. Once he began studying to be a deacon, he dived into learning, asking difficult questions. 

“I wanted to take my hardest issues to God in the midst of having this wonderful opportunity to ask all of the challenging questions on controversial issues,” Hurdley said. “You need to take on the hard issues. If you push them to the background, then you’re not prepared for them. Jesus is truth. He is truth and love and I want to know the truth. I threw myself at it and I felt more and more called and convinced that, yes, God is calling me to this.”

Hurdley said his instructors responded to his questions with great intellect and grace.

“When two or more are gathered in Our Lord’s name, he is amongst us,” he said. “And in the midst of these conversations, there would be a revelation of something the Lord wanted to share with the group. The Lord used these opportunities to reveal not just fundamentals of the faith but who we are – who we are as a community and what He wants us to know. I began to look for it and love it.”