Although just 36 years old, the Rev. Jeremy Lucas, priest at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, is used to making major life-changing decisions.

He practiced law with his father, George Lucas, in Birmingham for four years, but decided to branch out to a totally different path by enrolling in seminary to study to become an Episcopal priest.

In the past year, Lucas and his wife of 12 years, Penny, have made another life-changing decision: they will leave Athens to become missionaries to Namibia this summer.

They’ve sold their home and have to be out shortly. Friends have allowed them to stay in their river home for a couple of months. His last Sunday at St. Timothy’s is May 25.

“We will have been here almost exactly four years,” Lucas said. “We’ll be heading up to New York for two weeks of orientation, then back to Birmingham where my family lives, and then we leave for Namibia where there will be an installation ceremony in St. George Anglican Cathedral in Windhoek.”

The South African country is twice the size of California but mostly covered by the Namib and Kalahari deserts. Only 2 million people live there, but it is a country of contradictions.

Ten percent of the people have more wealth than the other 90 percent combined. It has the fifth-highest HIV-infection rate in the world, running as high as 40 percent in some areas. The country has the highest tuberculosis-infection rate in the world. The average life expectancy is 43.

While deserts with 1,000-foot sand dunes cover most of the country, Namibia also has the second-deepest canyon in the world, surpassed only by the Grand Canyon. Torrential rains have plagued the northern area of the country in recent months, and malaria, cholera and intestinal viruses rampant. More than 26,000 animals have died in the flooding.

But Namibia is also becoming a vacation destination for many to the luxurious resorts springing up along the Atlantic coast. The country gained notoriety last year when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt went there to have their daughter delivered in seclusion.

Met on blind date

Jeremy and Penny met on a blind date arranged by a fraternity brother of Jeremy’s who was married to a high school friend of Penny’s.

“They had set her up on two other blind dates before me and she told them if this one didn’t work out she wouldn’t let them set her up on any more,” Lucas said. “We were married in 1995.”

Penny, a native of Gadsden, is a nurse for Hospice of Athens-Limestone County. Jeremy said he was happy practicing law with his father in Birmingham, “but the short story is I thought the world needed more priests than lawyers,” he said. “The long story is I became more and more involved in church, and people began asking if I’d ever considered going to seminary. The call came from the community I was involved in. God speaks to me most clearly through the people I care about. I listen carefully and pray deeply. It took me about a year and a half while I was practicing law to decide to become a priest.”