Forty years after graduating, Brenda Esch ’83 is back in Greensboro, this time as New Garden Friends’ new pastoral minister.

What is it about the solitude of a lake – with only the water, the trees and your thoughts to keep you company – that can be so clarifying? A year ago Brenda Esch ’83 was leading a Friends school in Wilmington, N.C., when she felt a need to recharge and reflect. She packed her bags and spent the next four seasons at her parents’ summer lake house in Indiana.

“It was kind of a gap year for me,” says Brenda. “A chance to take my time, to get outside and slow down, notice what was all around me. I really grounded my spiritual self and my life at the lake. I learned a lot about who I am and what I wanted.”

That year back home brought clarity to Brenda, who this summer returned to her second home of sorts. In July she became the new pastoral minister at New Garden Friends Meeting, where Brenda, a lifelong Quaker, worshiped while attending Guilford just across the street

“This is something of a spiritual homecoming for me,” says Brenda. “The spirit of this meeting and the spirit of this place where New Garden Friends Meeting and Guilford College are within sight of each other means so much to me.”

Brenda credits her four years at Guilford as helping her see and name her gifts. As a student, she helped organize the student-led Quaker Concerns Group on campus around the same time that Judy Harvey, who worked at Guilford for 21 years, was founding the Friends Center on campus.

“It was a very yeasty time at Guilford in terms of planting seeds of service and action in the world,” she says. “The Quaker Concerns Group brought David Mallery (a Quaker educator) to campus to lead a workshop and he was the person who saw and named my potential and eventually inspired me to become an educator.

“Quaker institutions, whether Meetings, schools or non profits, are really good at listening for and naming gifts in people, noticing the place where joys and passions meet the world’s needs toward justice, inclusion and belonging,” says Brenda. “Guilford was exactly this place when I was a student.”

Brenda majored in Religious Studies. “I never saw (a career in education) coming, but the connections I made with people at Guilford, and then later led me into that life.”

She says the College’s faculty and mentors “encouraged students to fill the gaps that we saw at Guilford.”

“When people see a gap and have ideas around making the place better or doing something that needs to be done that isn't being done, that is exciting to me,” she says.

Brenda, the first Guilford graduate to serve as NGFM pastoral minister since 1949, wants to see what gaps can be filled between the Meeting and the College. “I'm really excited about connecting with individuals and with groups at Guilford,” she says.

“There’s a deep, long connection between New Garden Friends Meeting and Guilford College, a long association, more than a hundred years old. And it's going to look different as we each evolve. I’m grateful to be part of discovering those gaps and filling them.”