I. Love

jim & pam

The streets were flooded on both sides with people carrying pickaxes and hammers. Some carried megaphones and flashlights, and some carried torches. The flames licked the night sky and the floodlights overhead illuminated the graffitied brick that stretched for nearly 30 miles. 

In 1991, the Berlin Wall came down. Among the hoards of people on the West side was a young American woman from Colorado who had run away to Germany to escape the disillusionment of the revival. She wanted to find God without any distractions. This was a decision she would be glad she made for years to come.

She was only in Germany for four years, but it was in Germany that Pam grew up and became the woman she is today. Between her studies of Mozart and of artists and writers, she found herself reborn into a solidified faith, a feeling of finality that she hadn’t felt before. In Germany, she found God again, a life changing moment that would not have been the same anywhere else. 

As she would sit in the square of a little gothic town in Germany sipping a coffee and watching the world go by around her, she realized she was finally living, and she thanked God for it. 

Jim had gone to a liberal arts school in Illinois, faith unknown to him. His mind was consumed with numbers and graphs, an engineer in his natural reality. However, he craved the electricity that came with a liberal arts mindset, craved the freedom of free thinking. 

He found God to be a rational decision; a God made sense to him analytically, but God was not Jim’s foundation. He found himself neck deep in a failing marriage, and realized that his foundation had become her opinion of him. After 17 years, his eyes were opened.  

One evening, in the quiet darkness of the Colorado mountainside, Jim cried. 

He begged God to give him a foundation that could not be shaken. A year went by where Jim would sit outside his home in the morning sun and cry to God for help. A year went by before Jim heard a reply. 

What he heard was exactly what he needed. Jim realized he was loved by a God who would never take that love away from him, and he built a foundation that was brand new. 

In 1988, his wife left. Jim retired young and pursued water sanitation for developing countries, creating an organization that took him to Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. His organization gave him courage, his children gave him hope, but his faith gave him his foundation. 

Jim has an anecdote: we are all beings called “WISPs”, an acronym that stands for “wounded, imperfect/insecure, self-centered/sinful people.” The magic of it is when God can bring together two WISPs to love each other through life. 

“One of the biggest challenges [in the church] is that often we don’t admit we’re WISP,” Jim says. “It’s hard for the Lord to do much healing unless we can admit we’re WISP.”

When Jim met Pam, it was in a coffee shop in Denver. Both became a part of a group called Great Decisions, a discussion group that met every so often to discuss a series of internationally social issues. 

They got married on Valentines Day in 1999 in Nigeria. To Jim, Pam is his “wonderful, perfect wife,” and he thanks God every single morning for her. She has spunk, an excitement for life, and pushes him to be considerate, patient, and mature. “She is a great companion for this journey,” he says as he glances at her lovingly. 

To Pam, Jim is her daily source of laughter. “He makes me laugh a lot,” she says, chuckling at his antics even then. “He doesn’t care to be real serious, and he puts perspective on a lot of things.” She loves to learn and continue learning, and he pushes her to constantly learn and grow. “I love Jim’s intelligence,” she says.

It’s not always easy, but marriage usually isn’t. Their communication has strengthened over time, using a practical theory of speaking and listening to one another during hard times that allows them to overcome nearly anything. The best love stories are made through people who overcome odds. Love does not mean you will always agree with one another, see eye to eye, or live out your days never arguing. Love means that despite the bad days, you cannot see yourself living a single day without them. 

Married for now 21 years, Jim and Pam have a relationship based on the idea that they are broken people who love each other. They are not each other’s foundations, but strive to push each other to something more solid. Because when a love can push you to grow and change and be better than you are, that’s how you know it’s a love that lasts. 

“We’re WISPs,” Jim smiles, “but we admit it.”