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.

Back then she tended two congregations 30 miles apart. One a modest sanctuary of industrial design. The other had been raised a century earlier by quarrymen who chiseled scripture into limestone lintels, convinced the Lord liked his Word carved deep. Sundays she preached twice, zig-zagging county roads while the frost still clung to ditch grass. Between sermons she huddled with a farmer about to lose his fourth-generation acreage, then hurried to sit with a widow so brittle she looked like she would break with one good sneeze. 

She worked from a cramped office on the main floor, the walls sweating each summer like a sinner caught lying. Her desk was a battlefield of hymnbooks, unpaid heating bills, and T-ball schedules. She knew the family histories behind every name scrawled there, knew who secretly cut firewood for the retired schoolteacher, knew whose pantry rattled with nothing but mouse droppings. And because she knew, she showed up—quietly, firmly, sometimes with nothing more than a roasted chicken and a willingness to listen while the recipient pretended not to cry.

Two decades have rearranged the furniture of her life, but not the foundation. She has retired from full-time pastoring—that is the lie she tells her medical chart. In truth she has become a circuit rider, rotating among three churches like a comet in low orbit, never distant enough for folks to forget her pull. There is no office now, only a kitchen table cluttered with handwritten sermon notes, half-drunk coffee gone the color of river mud, and, one more than one occasion, a burlap sack of venison bound for the food bank.

That venison arrives courtesy of hunters she wrangles each hunting season. She does not hunt; she organizes, sleeves rolled, voice level. “The food bank needs protein,” she reminds them, and full-bearded men who speak fluent camouflage suddenly remember the Beatitudes. They field-dress their kill with the precision of surgeons because Pastor Pam asked them to, and they deliver twenty-pound parcels of meat that will simmer all winter in crockpots across the county.

Habitat for Humanity claims another slice of her calendar. She has sat on its regional board so long the minutes read like a diary of calloused hands and unfinished mortgages. On build days, she was not the ribbon-cutting dignitary but the one in paint-flecked overalls, coaxing crooked studs into plumb with a seven-pound hammer. She quotes scripture as she works, not to shame the volunteers but to remind them why the hammer in their hands matters as much as the prayer on their lips.

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 mourners’ 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 remember they are not alone in their remembering. Pastor Pam offers no spectacle. She offers presence. Some Sundays that is 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. Arthritis nips her knuckles, but she refuses the cushion 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 where fluorescent lights hummed and potluck aromas still haunted the air. She eyed the envelope as she might 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. 

She accepted the gift the way an oak accepts lightning—rigid, crackling, inevitable. “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. Pastor Pam buries hope daily: in sermons stitched with local gossip so the timid will listen; in Habitat walls plumbed true so a toddler’s first steps won’t tilt; in handwritten notes slipped under doors at dawn so the grieving will find company with their coffee.

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 is mending the single fragile seam that runs through all of us, the seam that promises we are seen and we are worth the seeing. I have witnessed her stitch that seam with the gold thread of her own breath. It is a quiet heroism, yes, but make no mistake—it is the kind that tilts the axis of small towns and keeps the barn swallows returning each April.

Someday she will set down the hammer, the venison ledger, and the dog-eared Bible. She will close her front door against the evening breeze and know she has earned her rest. Until that day, the circuit will glow with her taillights, and the people will lean forward when they spot that Jeep cresting a gravel ridge. They will say, “Pastor Pam’s a coming.” Their voices will lift, lighter than the road dust, because where she is, hope is. Because where she is, generosity has put on its walking shoes.

In the end, it was not the large gestures, but the small, steady acts of love and faith that define her. She is a woman who gives all of herself, leaving little behind for her own needs. And in the silent hours of the night, when the world sleeps, she prays not for herself, but for the strength to keep going, to be the rock her people need, one day at a time.