Pastor Pam

In the heart of Missouri, where the soil is rich and the lives of the people are steeped in simplicity and tradition, lives a woman whose calling was not to the fields, but to the souls that till them. Pam Sebastian, or “Pastor Pam,” as she is known, serves two churches in two towns that dot the map like seeds scattered by the hand of God. One a simple, modest house of worship, the other a glorious testament to time and history built by hands that knew the ache of labor. They are places where faith was not a matter of show, but of survival…

Well, that was true then—back in 2005—when I met Pam during my time with the Missouri Photo Workshop. Today she is more a “circuit rider”-type pastor. She rotates among three different churches. She no longer has a formal office and works out of her home.

What hasn’t changed is that her life of service and dedication to others is really where the idea for the Hope & Generosity Tour started. I figured there must be hundreds, thousands, or more people just like her whose stories go unsung and whose lives are simply a quiet testament to the resilience and power of hope and generosity. 

I choose Pam to be the poster child of the tour, the first recipient of the $1,000 gift. I needed someone to front my GoFundMe campaign for the tour and I could think of no one more convincing than her. So I set off for Missouri again; she wasn’t hard to find.

I figured there must be hundreds, thousands, or more people just like
her whose stories go unsung and whose lives are simply a quiet testament
to the resilience and power of hope and generosity. 

I first met her in the spring of 2005, the year the rivers all ran fat and the price of diesel made old men curse at the filling station. She stood in the doorway of “the rock church,” a 150-year-old historic monument to honest stonecutting labor and Presbyterian tradition.

She was wiping flour from her hands—she’d been rolling piecrust for a funeral reception—and studying me with eyes that did not blink so much as settle. Her greeting was neither grand nor perfunctory. It was a simple nod, as if to say, Come in if you’re hungry; stay out if you’re selling snake oil. In that nod lived a sermon. I stayed.

She used to minister to two congregations 30 miles apart. This meant she preached twice each Sunday, negotiating winding country roads. Between sermons I saw her huddle with a farmer in anguish because he was about to lose his fourth-generation farm. Then she scurried over to sit with a widow so brittle she looked like one good sneeze would break her.

Her office, cramped, with walls sweating in summer like a sinner caught lying, was her HQ for everything from hymnbooks to unpaid heating bills and T-ball schedules. Scattered post-it notes contained names and phone numbers; she knew the histories of everyone on those notes. And because she knew all their stories, she would show up, quietly, firmly, sometimes with nothing more than a casserole and a willing ear to listen for however long it took.

Twenty years on, the furniture of her life has been rearranged, but the foundation remains true. She is "retired" from full-time pastoring—at least that is the lie she tells her medical chart. These days she is a modern-day circuit rider, rotating among three churches. Her office is now the kitchen table. It's usually cluttered with handwritten sermon notes, half-drunk coffee the color of river mud; one more than one occasion a burlap sack of venison bound for the food bank. The venison is courtesy of hunters; she wrangles each deer hunting season, imploring them that "the food bank needs protein." And so they give, camouflage generosity, remembering the Beatitudes.

Habitat for Humanity claims another slice of her calendar. She has served on the regional board for longer than she cares to remember. But she'd rather be in overalls, pushing a paint roller across a wall, rather than sit through yet another meeting of minutes and the mundane. 

Her voice is a study in contrasts. It can soothe like creek water sliding over limestone, or it can break against stubbornness like a pry bar against rusted bolts. I have heard it hush a sanctuary packed with grief, each mourner's sigh woven into her benediction. I have also heard it ring—short, sharp sentences arranged like barbed wire. She is kind. She is relentless. These traits live in permanent alliance.

The towns she serves are aging. Grain elevators once white as Sunday shirts now wear rust streaks that look like tear tracks. Young people leave, chasing paychecks on the interstate. Those who stay measure progress in repaired gravestones and the return of purple martins in March. They do not attend church to be dazzled. They attend to seen and heard. She offers presence. Some Sundays that's the holiest miracle imaginable.

Presence, however, exacts a toll. Her hair, streaked with silver, is pulled back in a hurried twist that surrenders strands to the wind. Her joints ache, yet she refuses the luxury of preaching from a stool. She stands because the Word deserves legs beneath it. She stands, too, at hospital bedsides past midnight, coaxing psalms from a throat lined with fatigue. More than once she’s climbed into her Jeep after a fourteen-hour day only to sit motionless, both hands on the wheel, the cabin light exposing the tremor in her shoulders. She allows herself thirty seconds of stillness. Then the key turns, and headlights carve a path home.

She pays for such stubbornness in blood pressure readings that worry her doctor and nights where sleep is a stranger that only waves from the porch. Yet complaint is foreign currency to her tongue. Ask how she is, and she will tilt her head, considering, as though cataloging a thousand unvoiced aches, then reply something like, “Blessed beyond measure.” 

It was her capacity for sacrifice, her insistence that love must cost the giver something, that seeded the Hope & Generosity Tour in my own restless mind. I looked at her life—turned outward like an open palm—and imagined an army of such unseen stalwarts scattered across forgotten zip codes. I suspected they, too, were bone-tired but unbowed, and I wanted the world to know them. She became my “poster child,” though she would laugh at that phrase and swat it aside like a horsefly. When I launched a GoFundMe to finance the tour, I placed her story at the top, trusting her authenticity to burn away skepticism. It did. Donations started to flow.

Long before the first mile of my journey, I drove back to Missouri with an envelope heavy enough to make a banker smile. One thousand dollars. I handed it to her in the fellowship hall amongst the hum of fluorescent lights and the aroma of the last potluck. It might as well have been a snake in a shoebox. “Why?” she asked. “It’s for whatever grace tells you. No strings attached. Do with what you will.” A long pause. Then a half-laugh, half-sob escaped her chest. 

“I know just where this is going,” she said. And she recounted a story about a small, Civil War-era Black church in town that had been forced to start holding services in the basement because the roof had been condemned. “They’ve been trying to save for a new roof… money’s scarce,” she said through her tears. “This should put them over the top to get those repairs done.” 

She will endure until the heart clenched behind her sternum calls time. On afternoon she met at dawn her home where a menagerie of dogs announced my arrival. She held a Mason jar of sweet tea, the ice clinking like distant chimes. “What keeps you going?” I asked, not for the first time. She looked toward the horizon where the sun blazed down on the fallow fields. “Love is work,” she said. “Work isn’t done.”

Her answer hangs in my ear whenever cynicism tempts me. It reminds me that hope, like seed corn, is small and unremarkable until it is buried. Only then does it multiply. That's how Pastor Pam nurtures hope: she buries it in sermons wrapped in real life; in Habitat walls painted with an expertise born of repetition, and in handwritten notes slipped under doors at dawn.

She gives until her pulse stutters, then she gives a bit more. The cardiologist frowns. She smiles back. There is a secret behind that smile, a calculus older than medicine: better a heart worn thin by generosity than one thickened by caution.

When historians tally the arithmetic of empires, they will overlook her. That is fine. She is not building empires. She's building lives, one day at a time, because where she is, hope is.