BY IRMA FRITZ
For the Reporter

William Rima has been many things in his life: a son, a husband, a father, a U.S. Marine, a programmer, a schizophrenic and a homeless person.

Of all of these experiences, his illness and resulting homelessness had the biggest impact on his life.

And now Rima is on his way to transforming himself once again – this time as a pastor who ministers to the homeless.

For Rima, it’s been a long road from his birthplace in Auburn to graduate school at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary (PLTS) in Berkeley, Calif., where he is beginning his master of divinity studies this fall.

Rima was born in Auburn in 1974 and raised by his aunt and uncle on the Colville Indian Reservation in Eastern Washington. He married his high school sweetheart, and they had a daughter. After eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps, including deployments to Okinawa and Korea, his marriage had ended and he left the Corps. He remarried and found work with a leading supplier of automated testing equipment in Southern California.

“Up until this time,” Rima said, “my life had not been so very extraordinary. But when I began to show signs of schizophrenia, it was like falling off a cliff. I lost my job, my wife and I separated and then I became homeless.”

Rima lived on the streets for three years, sleeping in woods, in homeless camps, in church doorways, and at shelters. He suffered much from isolation, exposure to the elements, and hunger. He subsisted on church suppers for the homeless, often only one meal a day.

“Then a real-life angel appeared and referred me to Lutheran Compass Center,” Rima said.

He spent three months at the center while a counselor worked his case, coordinating with the VA and getting him moved to a veterans facility. Having achieved some stability, Rima took his meds regularly and began work as a vendor for Real Change, the progressive weekly street newspaper that provides employment for the homeless and poor. When he received housing assistance for veterans, he moved back to Auburn and became a member of Kent Lutheran Church.

Kent Lutheran Church had a special place in Rima’s heart. It was one of the churches where he had slept – right under the pastor’s window – when he was homeless. The church had also fed him through their Kent Community Monday Night Supper Program. Rima applied for and received a food handler’s permit in order to volunteer for the very program that had helped keep him alive, as well as other community supper programs in the area.

“I had a desire to help other homeless people, some of whom had been on the streets much longer than I,” Rima said.

From this ambition to help others grew an idea that became reality when he was accepted at Trinity Lutheran, a private four-year Christian liberal arts college in Everett. In May of this year he graduated summa cum laude and was a proud speaker, giving the graduating class response. He applied to graduate school at PLTS in Berkeley. Shortly thereafter, he learned that an anonymous donor had paid for his first year of studies.

In addition, he has already been offered candidacy by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) upon graduation from PLTS.

Rima, who still carries his possessions with him in a backpack wherever he goes, has come a long way from homelessness to graduate student. He knows there is still a hard road ahead of him until he earns his master of divinity and can fulfill his ambition of ministering to the homeless.

While he says, “vita incerta est – life is uncertain,” he also believes that God performs miracles. “My own life is proof of that.”