Spirit Lake Retreat

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More Footprints

Piecemeal Redemption

Today we are only a part of ongoing ministry

Took a paintbrush to one building at Fort Totten, undercoat preparing it for more paint.

The museum showed Native engagement with white people

Battles through the Civil War,

Cultural violence of the Reservation schools

“Preventatoriums” for TB

All housed at Fort Totten at one time or the other.

Toured the B & B decoratively frozen in the 19th century.

Late lunch at Charras and Tequilas in Devil’s Lake.

Chicken Pollo was spicy enough and filling with Modello Negra.

Heard the hilarious tale: why Cathy York does not drink “M” drinks anymore.

We shared more and more with the younger people of this mission trip.

The one-on-one blessed and personal.

Table groups made me feel the generation gap.

Larger groups were full of love and shared accomplishments.

Final evening at at Spirit Life Ministries,

Pastor Mike was touching, celebrating our accomplishments.

Communion: bread and juice  by intinction, love infusing everything.

Folk-style unfamiliar music.

Solemn warmth shared with the teenagers,

Giddy at times, sometimes lovable .

 

I need to spend some time sharing love.

 

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Footprints of God

Spirit Lake Mission: Day Two

Sun breaking through the clouds

The weather  breezy, cool and moderate temps.

Joy in working with teen partners

The helpful three amigos . . .

Kenzie bringing coffee to Chris after she spilled hers.

Theo’s proposed invention of a recirculating rifle for enjoyment.

In the trailer demolition

 

 

 

 

 

 

Solomon working hard despite a sore back.

We struggle with staplers, nails, screws of various purposes

but the room temp weather is wonderful.

At lunch Cabbage Potato Soup from Sharon.

The afternoon demo work is slow

Mark digs out a dried rat corpse

Along with staples and nails

The trailer floor coming clean.

 

 

 

 

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More Footprints

Resonance

In the evening Dakotah music and stories:

Sitting around a resounding drum of elk skin,

Seven musicians beat  the edges softly as the lead singer

Calls out a  melody, full of notes no notation could capture.

Slurring up and down the scale,

The notes echo in louder voices

The drum starts sharply at the sides

Then resonantly in the middle, pounding like

The beating of a giant heart, shaking our own.

The “Happy Birthday”  pounds distinctly

Happy Birthday 4

[Click twice on “Happy Birthday 4” sung for Mark Michel]

Voices and drum boom and our hearts rumble in harmony

Finally drop, as the sticks drift back on the edges

Answering voices lower and lower.

The music continues like soft yodeling

We settle in rest and safety.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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God’s Footprints

Devil’s Lake

The weather makes our retreat a resort—partly cloudy and breezy every day.

We ride into town

Snaking through the middle of a lake,

The narrow path of trees and foliage that winds from Spirit Lake,

To the side called “Devils Lake,”

To the Wal-Mart by-pass.

We buy paint and personal necessaries,

Spirit Lake

Returning to “Spirit Lake” with its gravel roads, one-story dwellings

A water tower brightly lettered “Spirit Lake.”

At the guest house paint project I unscrewed the switch plates

Found some paint guards to help painting clear boundaries.

Moved on to  laying tar paper on a small connecting roof

Not a radically-skilled operation, but demanding to measure

Grateful to MP for measuring and cutting.

Tomorrow’s adventure:  laying actual shingles.

 

Finding Footprints

How do we see “God’s footprints,”

Individual routine moments or silent struggle,

Without drama?  What is the difference

Between a job merely well done and a job graced by God?

It’s what you think happened, more than what happened.

To the casual observer, it is a struggling soul, persevering to the end.

To the soul , it is moments that could end in frustration, then are detoured to success.

My ability to put on a roof is nil,

With a willingness to ask for help and not get annoyed when the answer

Is not within my grasp, something special has happened.

Grace or force  of will are two different ways to see accomplishment.

 

“Neither,” the cat,  jumped onto the powered garden cart/trailer

Rode across the front lawn

To the short stretch of roof we will shingle today

Probably disappointed she had such a short ride, but I enjoyed her company.

Mike painstakingly showed me how to load the electric nail shooter and fire away.

When I took my first shot up on the roof—nothing, then nothing again.

We started pounding nails the old-fashioned way

Mike showed up, tinkered with the pressure, and voila! I was shooting nails.

With Mike’s guidance and MP’s cutting the shingles for the edges,

The work went smoothly.

I had only to line up the shingles and shoot them.

Never mind the sun, the sweat, the up and down on the ladder,

The hydrating, the nail shooter that would not reload once it was emptied,

The roof got shingled. Every bit of it grace, even the sweating part.

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God’s Fingerprints

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.