For several years, Virginia Baptist mission teams have ministered on the Standing Rock Reservation, the fourth largest Native American reservation in the U.S, straddling the border of North and South Dakota. Michael Clingenpeel, pastor of River Road Church, Baptist, in Richmond, is with a mission team there this week and is sending daily impressions of the work there.
FORT YATES, N.D. — Most of life involves just showing up.
That old adage applies when it comes to Virginia Baptists doing missions in North Dakota.
North Dakota is right on the way to where you’re going if you happen to be Meriwether Lewis, William Clark or a member of the Corps of Discovery. They passed within sight of our hotel’s location when they sailed up the Missouri River over 200 years on their epic journey to the Pacific.
In my case, it took about six decades to get here. I managed to set foot in 44 other states, including Hawaii and Alaska, prior to leaving my footprints in the square at the center top of the United States map.
It’s 1,831 miles from Richmond to the Prairie Knights Casino, a 98-room hotel and wagering emporium situated in the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. That’s the odometer reading on Earl Banton’s Dodge pickup when he arrived two and one-half days after leaving Richmond on Thursday morning. He made the trip alone, pulling a trailer loaded with supplies needed by the 150 or so volunteers who traveled here for a week of mission service on the Reservation.
Earl’s trailer had a bad tire which rolled its final mile in Kentucky, where he stopped at a ubiquitous Wal-Mart to see if they would change it. Changing a tire on a heavily-loaded trailer is not a one-man job. They changed the trailer tire for the spare he had brought along, didn’t charge him a cent and sent him on his way. It’s the kind of thing that is covered by our prayers when we ask for “traveling mercies.” Hikers call people like that “trail angels.”
Most of the volunteers from Virginia traveled like I did, by plane. They stopped in places like Minneapolis, Chicago or Detroit, but most of them arrived without incident, wearing teal-colored T-shirts bearing the symbol of this mission partnership and the motto “Heart and Hand.”
“Heart and Hand” describes what this mission is about — people holding out their hands to grasp the hands of others in friendship. It’s a two-way street. Both give. Both benefit.
When this week’s volunteers gathered Sunday afternoon in the town of Cannonball, N.D., to get acquainted and get our marching orders for the week, Bob Hetherington, director of missions for the Roanoke Valley Baptist Association, and visioncaster along with his late wife, Judy, for this partnership, urged us to “focus on the people.”
Today, Monday, everyone will scatter across the Standing Rock Reservation, in land area the size of Connecticut, and begin doing just that.