Jennifer Sands

Mercy Hope: September 11, 2001 forever altered the course of your life – and through the tragedy of losing your husband, and lover, Jim, you came to know the Lover of your soul. Share your story.

Jennifer Sands: My husband Jim and I were married for five years and we were inseparable. We loved doing everything together. We were scuba divers and were training to be dive instructors. Jim was also an underwater photographer, but in the real world, I am a pharmacist and Jim was a computer software engineer. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. He had a long commute from our home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan – two hours each way. Because he was on the road so much I worried about things like car accidents, so every morning I would pray for God to keep him safe – and I prayed that morning when he left – the morning of 9/11 – so when he didn’t come home I was devastated, and very, very angry. But unlike so many other people who were affected by 9/11 my anger was not directed at the terrorists. Not that I’m justifying, defending or minimizing what they did, it was incomprehensible, but I didn’t pray to Osama Bin Laden every morning to not attack our country. I prayed to God every morning to keep Jim safe, so all of my anger was directed at God.

This is where I need to give you a little background on my faith. Before 9/11 my spiritual life was very limited. My relationship with Jesus was nonexistent. I never owned a Bible. I never read a Bible. I never even opened a Bible. I never made any attempt to understand God and His Character, His Word and His Nature. I believed in God, from a distance, and I kind of understood that Jesus was sent here to live, and that He died for the sins of men, and that He rose again, but I didn’t consider myself to be a sinner, so I didn’t think I needed Jesus in my life and I had no interest in Him whatsoever. I just thought that showing up in church every Sunday – in body, not in Spirit – was sufficient to protect me against anything bad happening in this life, or the next, which explains why I reacted the way I did after 9/11 with all the anger directed at God. Back then I did not understand the role that suffering plays in our lives, and the fact that God can use it to bring us closer to Him, to make us stronger and wiser, and just to teach us about Him and about ourselves and to make us realize our need for a Savior and our need for a relationship with that Savior.

Mercy Hope: How did you come to this truth? Was it mostly through the input of other people?

Jennifer Sands: Yes, mostly through other people. After 9/11 God responded to my anger and intervened in my life by sending a troop of people - not just my family because of course my family is my strongest support system - but friends, neighbors, complete strangers, and lot of Believers. He just surrounded me with Believers. At first I didn’t want to hear anything about God, but after a while He just started to soften my heart. He did so by doing some amazing tributes to Jim, which gave me something good to look forward to – something good and positive to focus on. Jim’s underwater photos were published in his favorite underwater magazine as a tribute to him. We also had an underwater memorial plaque placed down in Grand Cayman, which was one of our favorite places to dive, so there were amazing tributes that gave me something good to hold on to. Not only that, those tributes led to some thing bigger and better because the photos in the magazine eventually led to my new career as a Christian writer and speaker, and the dedication of the underwater memorial eventually led to my salvation. It was on that day, on that dive as we dedicated that reef to Jim that God made it indisputably evident me to that He is in control of my life. I realized that I had submerged into the water that day as one person - and was terrified. I was terrified of diving without Jim because I had never dived with anyone else. I was terrified of living the rest of my life without Jim. But I surfaced as another person because I realized that I really can live the rest of my life without Jim, but I cannot live the rest of my life without Jesus. That was about a year after 9/11.

Since then the Spiritual growth has been tremendous because once I accepted Christ I wanted to learn as much as I could about Him, so I started reading the Bible, and it’s so true that the Bible is the only book you read that reads you, and it changes you from the inside - and it changed me. It made me realize that I need to have an intimate relationship with Him. So my growth and my journey has been through other people, through the teachings of my pastor at my church…through spending time in His Word every day and private time fellowshipping with the LORD. There’s been tremendous growth, and now I’m just honored and humbled to be able to work for Him and to accomplish the purpose He has for my life – which I believe, is just to help other people go through their crises and their burdens and struggles.

Mercy Hope: I see that you are wearing a necklace with Jim’s image engraved on it, and also a unique and beautiful cross. Is there a story behind those items which you keep close to your heart?

Jennifer Sands: A few months after 9/11, my mom and my sister Maria gave me a very special gift: it was this gold heart necklace, with Jim's picture lasered onto the heart. When the light hits it a certain way, his face becomes vibrant, just as Jim always looked in life. I cried when they gave it to me - out of love for Jim and out of gratitude for my family.

In my first book, A Tempered Faith. I wrote a chapter called, “The Rose and the Lenox Vase,” based on a metaphor which had great significance in my life: A single red rose by itself is beautiful. A delicate vase displayed by itself is a work of art, but put the rose inside the vase and you have perfect unity. I am a rose. Jim was a Lenox vase. Alone, we were lovely. Together, we made each other shine. But one day, the vase came crashing to the ground and left the rose alone with a broken heart. After my best friend Amy read A Tempered Faith, she gave me another very special necklace. It is a stunning silver cross with a rose in the center, and these were her words to me: "The rose is not alone anymore ... the rose is now with the cross."

I wear both necklaces all the time - I never take them off. The meaning behind them goes far deeper than words - they are truly symbolic of my life since 9/11 as a New Creation. I will never forget Jim and the extraordinary love we both shared ... but I have now given my life to Christ, and it is in His perfect love and His comforting promises that I take refuge.

Mercy Hope: Through your books, and speaking, what is the main message you want to impart?

Jennifer Sands: The main message is that it is through Christ that we can get through the struggles and burdens of every day and accomplish our purpose. The first book, A Tempered Faith is the journey of my first year without Jim, so you are going to see all the anger in the beginning and then at the end of the book you can tell that I have accepted Christ, but the growth in between is tremendous.

Then the second book, A Teachable Faith is where God has taken me since then–the lessons the He has taught me that I share with my readers. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific topic like forgiveness, idolatry, patience, pride, trust, obedience, and all the lessons that He’s taught me through my everyday experiences. It’s not just about 9/11. There are struggles that I’m still dealing with that we all deal with. There is a lot of Scripture in the second book that I back up each chapter with, and my prayer is that the reader will apply it to their own lives. There are stories that are very amusing and entertaining and then some are very poignant and sentimental, but I believe that with each one of them the reader will be able to identify, and hopefully apply it to their own struggles.

Mercy Hope: Amen, and amen! Thank you so much for sharing with us.

Jennifer Sands: Thank you. It’s all Him! All glory and honor and praise be to Him. I just show up and He takes over. He’s in control, and when we relinquish our life and our future to Him and just give every facet of our life to Him He can take us places that we never dreamed possible.

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