On the Road to Spirit Lake Minstries
Are God’s fingerprints visible or found as grace, where God intervened with invisible interventions? We saw the fingerprints as the clouds rumbled in and the rain and hail fell out in the parking lot of Krohl’s Diner, then the grace when our cars apparently emerged unscathed as the weather swept out of Fargo toward the plains of Minnesota. The sudden burst was more exciting than the Fleischenkuchen (??) on my plate, which embodied the bland reputation of German cooking.
The trip to Spirit Lake Ministries, Sheyenne, ND was eventful enough. Victoria and I were supposed to rendezvous with our group at Sioux Falls, SD but we thought it was Sioux City, Ia about 90 miles to the south. Before we hit the highway exit we contacted the expedition leaders and had our bearings re-set, and thus made the rendezvous an hour and a half later. Victoria’s impulse to call in before we arrived at our hotel was grace to me, because I would never have called ahead.
I’ll say little about our accommodations, except that we had to choose between the air conditioning running loudly on “low” and the TV running on high. The sound of one drowned out the other. The bathroom had a silent heater that ran without ceasing, unless the hardware in the wall might have handled it if covered by a plastic regulator. The shower had a sharp prickly stream, once it was engaged. O.K. we came, we slept, we ate. Enuf said.
Back to beauty. We passed two wind turbine farms on our way north on Route 29. Some see them as landscape pollution, but I see them as majestic robots harnessing the wind with their graceful revolutions. I still have the romance of the windmill in my brain, or some green energy fantasy that makes me respond with admiration. They move in quiet beauty and grace.
Our stumbling in Sioux City foreshadowed our arrival at Spirit Lake Ministries the next day. Glenn called us on the phone to warn us that the GPS was going to lead us astray if we followed it to the end, but it was hard to decide when to stop following the GPS, because it was accurate most of the way. At one point we were on 8100 Avenue, but could not find the official “Spirit Lake” sign, so we turned around and headed back down the road, this time with nothing but the grace of God to guide us. We were in deep woods and high grass when suddenly the sign emerged, and we were there. This was a neighborhood where signs and GPS had both deserted us, so we felt the sigh of gratitude, when “Spirit Lake Ministries” emerged like a lighthouse on the rocks.
To me that was a God-sighting without the visible signs to mark it. Pastor Mike asked us to notice such sightings as we began our mission on Monday, so I am now going to notice what did not as well as did happen in the day. God’s footprints in the sand deserve to be noticed along with those sightings that we can point out and report.
Oh yes, we met three young ladies at dinner: Lily, Katie and Kenzie, who were very gracious to bus the tables and clean the cloth. By grace I may remember their names tomorrow.