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By Joel Erickson, for the Tribune

How does it come to be that a woman works full time as a police officer for the St. Paul Police Department and part time as an ordained Lutheran pastor for some eight years?

To know the answer to that question you would need to ask Cheryl Lindehar. Presently, she serves as the interim associate pastor half time for Grace Lutheran Church and half time for First Lutheran Church.

Ordained in 2002, she lived that dynamic, challenging eight-year experience. Both in serving as a police officer and as an ordained pastor, she had a strong sense of calling. She said God was leading her and still does in this present time.

In her senior year at Hamline University in 1975 and 1976, her spirit was awakening to a sense that she needed God more in her life, “something was missing,” she said.

As she contemplated what would follow after graduating from Hamline, she applied for several different places to work, and one place was the St. Paul Police Department. A

ll the employment doors closed except for the police department ,and they were seeking applications from women. She was accepted along with six other women in 1976.

Lindehar said she felt called because as she says, police work is about working with people. She viewed this as a noble calling where it is essential to listen to people, to bring a calming presence. She says you don’t start the fight, you let the fight come to you. This she learned from a seasoned officer. Also, her degree in social work was good preparation for what she faced as an officer.

While serving as a police officer, her friend invited her to a Lutheran church. Because  of her Slovenian background, she  was raised in the Catholic tradition but as she puts it “we were kind of the Christmas, Easter bunch.”

For her first visit to the Lutheran church she sat in the balcony and two things impressed her. The service was in English, and Lutherans loved to sing, plus they had a social hour with coffee and cookies where people visited with each other.

She became involved and connected with the pastor who was compassionate and eventually she served on the church council.

After she gave a presentation at the church council at one of their many meetings, one of the members said to her she should really think about going to the seminary.

Two different times she attended camp council where the council members spent time together seeking direction for the church. During that time, she said the Spirit was stirring in her. She fought going to the seminary, and because of that she refers to it as the dark night of her soul. She was resisting the movement of the Spirit and she needed to let him lead.

When she explored the possibility of seminary, she learned that it would entail taking Greek and Hebrew classes, and that really scared her because she didn’t do well with languages.

But God led her through it all even though all this time she worked full time as a police officer.

She has never married, so her time was not divided up by family obligations even, so working full time and going to the seminary was quite a process, over six years.

She remembers attending chapel at the seminary for the first time. She said it reminded her of the time she sat in the church balcony a time earlier. She really felt the presence of the Spirit.

She served as an intern in a Lutheran church that couldn’t afford to pay her, but she said that was OK — she was making enough serving as a full-time police officer.

Eventually she was ordained in 2002 and went on to work for about eight years both full time as a police officer and part time as an ordained pastor.  For about the last 10 years she has done interim ministry in the Southeastern Minnesota Synod.