Brent Krysa was ordained deacon along with Kathleen Aitken and Annette Procunier on Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026, at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London, Ontario. Photo: Charlotte Poolton
By Rev. Brent Krysa
“OUR HEARTS are restless until they find their rest in thee.”
I first heard those words while sitting in a parked car, listening to St. Augustine's Confessions read by the commanding baritone of actor Max McLean. At the time, I thought Augustine's words were beautiful. I did not yet realize they were describing me.
My journey toward ordination began, as many journeys do, in a car.
I was living in mine.
Most nights I parked wherever I could find a place that felt safe. Yet whenever possible, I found myself drawn toward church parking lots. They were quieter, calmer, and somehow felt like places where I could rest for the night.
Looking back, church parking lots are probably the worst places to be if you want to be left alone. Sooner or later, someone is going to come out and try to convert you. Maybe I had listened to enough Augustine by then to turn that assumption into a prayer of hope. Something kept drawing me back to churches, though I rarely went inside.
Church people, I imagined, had perfectly fine houses, perfectly fine routines, and perfectly fine jobs. They possessed a stability that looked so perfectly fine that, by contrast, it felt so very distant from my imperfect life.
So I stayed at the edges.
An employment counsellor eventually convinced me to step inside a church—his church. One February evening, he invited me to a Candlemas service. The name Candlemas suggested something effulgent and mystical, perhaps a poetry-infused, pyrocentric celebration with warm fuzzies... Instead, it was mostly just grey boxes of unblessed candles and a handful of worshippers.
There were only six of us, so we pulled our chairs into a tiny circle around the altar-my greatest concern that evening wasn't meeting God, but the unhappy prospect of small talk with strangers. Yet they simply made room for me without interrogation or examination. I left that evening with some unexpected questions, along with an invitation from one of the parishioners to join them on Sunday for the 8:00 a.m. Book of Common Prayer service.
The following Saturday night, I again spent the night in that church's parking lot, confident that I could always use that Sunday morning service as an excuse for why I was parked there so early. Overnight, freezing rain turned the lot into a sheet of ice. Sitting in my car Sunday morning as parishioners arrived, I decided it was best to just move along.
Then the church door opened.
The priest stepped outside. He saw me sitting there, crossed the icy parking lot, stretched out his hand, and helped me safely into the church. I remember very little of what he said…
…I remember the hand.
Looking back, I see that moment was part of a pattern. Again and again, Christ came toward me through invitations: an employment counsellor, a small congregation that made room, a priest who crossed an icy parking lot, and later professors, supervisors, parishioners, mentors, and friends who continued making room for me long before I believed there was a place for me.
I realize how much of that season was spent at the edges. I parked at the edges of parking lots and lingered at the edges of congregations, close enough to observe the life of the Church but not yet close enough to believe I belonged within it. Yet, little by little, God drew me inward—not through dramatic revelations, but through a long succession of invitations:
An invitation to attend a service.
An invitation into a circle.
An invitation to step carefully across the ice.
An invitation to pray.
An invitation to study.
An invitation to be ordained
An invitation to move further in from the edge.
Then, on May 31, 2026, I stood in the centre.
I stood in the centre of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in London. The Church gathered around me, and the bishop laid hands upon me. I thought of a time when I parked on the outer edges of church parking lots, hoping no one would notice I was there. Now I stood surrounded by all the people who had invited me in. The distance between those two places cannot be measured in kilometres or years. It can only be measured by the one thing that is immeasurable: God's grace-incomprehensible, overwhelming, and unlimited.
Ordination did not bring that story to an end. It drew me more deeply into it. The many hands laid upon me that day were the same hands that lifted me, welcomed me, and guided me for so many years. My prayer now is that, by God's grace, my own life may become one such outstretched hand (just one), to be the invitation for someone else to discover that Christ has been calling to them all along.
Rev. Brent Krysa is Deacon Assistant to the Territorial Archdeacon of the North.