More About Pam and Kathy’s Friendship

Public Affection

Friendship moves from restaurants to classrooms —and now, to book covers

If there are key pillars in every friendship, then the first for Pam Morton and Kathy Jingling has got to be salsa.

“We love to meet in Mexican restaurants and discuss life,” Jingling says. Those meetings took on a new focus a few years ago, when the pair decided to take a women’s Bible study they’d been teaching locally and turn it into a national curriculum. The study is dubbed Creative Friendzy, and now Morton and Jingling are its author-ambassadors. Their faces are on books and boxes all over the country. They go on speaking tours. They balance the commitments of work and family with day-to-day maintenance of their self-owned publishing company, Daisies In The Rain Publishing Co. And they continue to develop new material every week for the Sunday-morning class they teach together.

But the surface isn’t where true friendships form.

“God has made this a very special friendship, that we can tolerate each other at such a high level,” Morton says. She’s 37, married, with two preteen girls at home. Jingling is 48 and single, a full-time missionary and fluent Spanish-speaker who has spent the last 17 years developing teaching curricula for use in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the surface, the two women don’t have much in common.

In 2002, the seed was planted for what would become Creative Friendzy.

I was having lunch with a friend one day,” says Morton, “and she made a joke – she said, ‘I’m going to have to move.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, I’ve decorated every room in my house, and I don’t have any rooms left.’”

Somehow, the comment stuck with Morton. Is that it? She drove home thinking. Or can women use their creativity for something more?

“That was my epiphany,” she says. “I really felt like it was time to combine women’s love for God and their love of creativity for the purpose of encouragement and evangelism.”