Rick and Rachel are both missionary/pastor’s kids.

She spent much of her formative years in South America, living in Paraguay, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Ecuador. She spent her senior year in Quito at Alliance Academy. It is to this same school that she now returns as school counselor. She loves sushi, psychology, tromping through prairie wilderness areas, Jorge Luis Borges, crocheting, beaches, Bev Doolittle, pork rinds, and all things Argentinian. Her parents were missionaries with The Church of the Nazarene.

Rick was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and spent many of his formative years in the Caribbean. He knows enough Spanish that Rachel has to talk about him behind his back. He loves gourmet cuisine, philosophy, camping, J.R.R. Tolkien, chain maille, mountains, Frank Lloyd Wright, candy corn, and all things Japanese. His parents were missionaries with The Church of God (Holiness), a conservative Wesleyan denomination.

When Rick’s parents returned from the mission field, they pastored a church in a small town in central Missouri, then one in Springfield, finally settling down for a while in Kansas City, KS. When it came time for college, Rick chose to attend the local Nazarene University, MNU.

Rachel’s folks returned from South America, and ended up settling in the Chicago area, but shipped Rachel ahead to attend school at Mid-America Nazarene as well.

Rick and Rachel attended MNU together for about six months before Rick moved on (read “dropped out”) but oddly enough, never met there. There were a couple of close calls, though.

One involved Rachel and a gaggle of her friends flirtatiously “Oreo-ing” the dorm-room window of a guy she was marginally interested in. They were almost caught in the act when someone came to the window and started messing with the curtain. The guy she was interested in was Raymond Hart, Rick’s best friend in college. The “someone” at the window was Rick, who was crashing with Raymond for the night. (Despite his love for Raymond, had he known Rachel at the time, Rick would definitely have attempted to warn her away.)

Some time later, Rick played a gig at a college event (after he’d stopped attending the school.) Rachel recalls hearing him play, thinking he was very “intense,” and asking a friend who he was. She was told, “He doesn’t go here anymore.” (On a side note, Rick did get a couple of dates out of that gig, both with a close friend of Rachel’s, Stacy Cruz. That relationship came to a screeching halt on the second date when, during a conversation regarding favorite musical artists, she said “Oh, they’re okay” when referring to Sting. Yes, sadly Rick really was that shallow.)

A couple of years later, providence would bring Rick and Rachel together, this time to actually meet. Of all places, the setting divinely appointed for that meeting was the layaway department of the Wal-Mart on 79th Street in Overland Park, KS. Rachel worked layaway, Rick worked electronics. Layaway had the only phone available for outgoing calls, so everybody came to layaway. Besides, word was that there were two new girls working layaway, both named Rachel, and both quite pleasant to look at.

Snippets of conversation ensued, enough to know both were preacher’s kids, that neither was an abject moron, and that there was a mutual attraction. Rick soon found out that Rachel had a significant other, and having at least some ethics, put the brakes on any romantic ideas. This in spite of catching her reading Sartre in her truck one day on lunch break, and walking back to his car with a huge silly grin, thinking about how much smart chicks blissed him out.

Things evolved. Tramaus encroached, pulling the two together. First, because of a shared worldview, perhaps, but soon just for the joy of it. More than two years passed of close friendship, with no real thought of dating. What they had was too precious to them. She met his family, and he met hers. They attended the same church, worked with the same youth group, hung out with the same group of friends, etc. Rachel remembers sensing that she would know Rick for the rest of her life, a sentiment that doesn’t come easily to the nomadic pastor’s child. Rick remembers the struggle of trying to maintain the appearance that this friendship was nothing more than platonic, even against good friends who subtly prodded for something more.

There came a flash point - a parting of the ways. Rick reacted to the assumptions and preconceptions, putting distance between them for some time, before realizing his grave error. He wrote her a letter, telling her that he was afraid … afraid of hoping for permanence … afraid like a small child that has just glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, something horrifying at his bedroom window and putters about persistently, busying himself with anything that will deny him time to look that way again. She wrote him back, telling him that the place he held in her life was like her brother’s, her long-time hero and best friend. Rick was driving home when he read that line. He dropped the letter into his lap, and said out loud “I’m going to marry her, aren’t I?” He says he felt God smile.

A few weeks later, they were dating. Not that there was an official first date, really. Rick remembers it transitioning gently into a mode where they were spending a lot more time together alone, and he was paying for everything. Somewhere along the way, they’d evidently started “dating.”

Once it was official, there wasn’t much more to be said. They both had known if they ever dated, that marriage would follow. Four-and-a-half months later, they were engaged. Four-and-a-half months after that, they were married.

Saturday, August 31, 1996 at roughly 2:30 in the afternoon, Rick and Rachel became Mr. and Mrs. Sams. While they admit it’s a sappy thing to say that every day since their picture-book wedding has been markedly better than the day before, they both insist that it’s God’s truth.

Until recently Rick and Rachel owned three ferrets, and loved spending copious hours doing youth ministry at their church. They spend way too much money on chinese food, dig M. Night Shyamalan, read a lot, really love each other’s parents, think that small talk is a waste of precious time, dream of owning two Harley’s, refuse to dress conventionally, act their age, or color inside the lines, want at least one German Shepherd puppy, like Scrabble, and usually stay up way too late because, after ten plus years of marriage, they still find lots of stuff to talk about at 1:00 a.m.