Please pray for our partner’s granddaughter, Dria, who is ill with an ear infection and strep throat. She has had a bad fever for a couple of days now and is on antibiotics. Due to this and the need for Grandma to stay with her and care for her, we have been flexible with our day schedules. All has worked out perfectly and our days are full of blessings and opportunities for service and ministry. Flexibility is crucial on any mission trip.

We have been working the past two days at the Dream Center – painting, trimming, assembling furniture, mudding, sanding, etc. There is never a shortage of work. This morning, I took the women to the Lakota Historical Center at the Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota. We always bring the teams to this center so that they can experience the history of the Lakota people.  We returned for lunch and to pick up Jeff who worked on mudding during the morning.

The entire team spent the afternoon driving to the different communities on Pine Ridge.  We spent some brief time at the Wounded Knee Massacre Site and Cemetery.  We drove through the communities of Evergreen, Porcupine, Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge and Manderson so that the team could see the scope of Wings as Eagles Ministry and also see a glimpse of the conditions on the reservation.  It is always eye-opening to see the living conditions for so many.  And these drives are just glimpses of the outside.  Life is hard here – very hard.

We made a deliberate trip to White Clay, Nebraska – the southern most point of the reservation and White Clay is just across the border – which is why they can sell alcohol there.  It has a population of 14 yet has the highest grossing sale of alcohol in all of Nebraska!!  White Clay breaks my heart.  We pulled into the street where for two blocks everything happens and immediately you see 40-50 Lakota sitting alongside the road or standing outside the buildings – most are drunk and stay that way most of the day and night.   They sleep and die in the fields by that road. We made around 55 bags with nutrition bars, soap and a washrag to hand out along with a bottle of water.  As soon as the team stepped outside the van, the people began to gather asking for what we had.  Some took them and left.  Many others gathered and talked, uninhibited by the alcohol in their systems.  They told jokes and stories.  They asked our names.  They told about serving in the military and how they still have nightmares.  They asked us to pray a blessing over them so we prayed with them and a couple of the men bowed on one knee as we prayed.  And then after the amen, they said “Thank you” in Lakota.  We had two women who asked for prayer for their brothers – John and Bret.  Will you join us in prayer for them?  I don’t know what John’s story was but I know Bret had been pulled from the fields a few days before, taken to Rapid City and then flown to Denver.  They asked us to have Bible Study with them but we had to move on to the rest of our schedule but promised to share that with our partners.  It is a common request from them.

I can’t really put into words what we feel when we visit White Clay.   Heartbreak.  Brokenness.  Extreme guilt and grief.  These just barely cover it.  To look these men and women in the eye, to smell the stench of urine and alcohol, to hear their pain and hopelessness in their words, to imagine them walking out to the fields in a drunken stupor as night comes with no option but to repeat it all the next day.  It all just kills us and we drive away in tears, thanking God that He allowed us to hold them in until we drove away knowing the last thing they need is our tears.  They need our respect and our appreciation for their service to our country.  They need our humility and compassion as equals and children of God.  They need our love shown through word and actions as share names and handshakes and listen to their stories.  They need the hope of Christ Jesus who came to set us all free from our sin and from our addictions.  Please pray for Reggie, Jacob, Carla, Rudolph, and the many other men and women whose names we don’t know but whose faces will remain in our hearts and minds.

Badlands National Park

Our mission team left Jefferson City on Saturday morning and arrived at the Dream Center around 4 pm on Sunday after staying the evening in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The 14-hours it takes to get here are less painful when broken up over two days and it always us to arrive rested and to take the time to visit a wonderful museum in Chamberlain, South Dakota. We try to always stop with our teams to give them a change to engage some Lakota history before we come for the week.

We enjoyed a quiet Sunday night of settling in, eating supper and catching up with friends here.  The weather is great – always a wonderful breeze to cool you in the sun and the rest of the week the temps are suppose to drop to mid-60s.  That will be a nice relief for many here.

Lisa paints trim in the stairway.

Today we stayed at the Dream Center to work on projects.  Most of the team worked on painting – painting trim, touch-ups, door frames, etc. as they prepare to put the finishing touches on those areas that are nearly done – like the offices, conference room and the worship center. Melissa spent the day working with Pamela Buchanan, the new Director of Administration for Wings as Eagles.  She began this past week and will be taking over several things that Melissa has done for WAEM this past year such as website, email newsletters, social media, etc.  We really accomplished a lot today and were blessed by the work.

Rebecca soars to new heights to paint trim.

We’ve enjoyed just hanging out after supper in the evenings – enjoying the landscape, shooting the BB gun, . It is a great opportunity to build community.

Tomorrow will involve some of the same and perhaps a trip into one of the communities to work with some children.  We are taking things one day at a time which is how you have to do it.  Our first rule of mission trips is to be flexible.  Our second rule is to see rule number one.

Thank you for your prayers and support.  We feel them and appreciate them.  We are blessed with a great team that is representing God and FBCJC exceptionally well.

Pat Swearingen and Kyle Camden enjoy the Christmas give-away in Pine Ridge.

On December 18, eight members of First Baptist Church traveled 15 hours north to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.   We were pulling a trailer that was packed tightly with every inch of space taken by Christmas gift boxes, coats and other donations, including 100 bottles of soap donated by Unilever.  We were on our way to spend a few days with our partners, Wings as Eagles Ministries, (WAEM) to deliver Christmas to the Lakota Native Americans on Pine Ridge.

Every year, WAEM provides a bright spot in the lives of so many adults and children who might otherwise not have Christmas gifts. Because of your generous donations of money, coats, and Christmas shoeboxes, we were able to help WAEM bring Christmas to the Rez.

Christmas distribution at Porcupine

We met up with two other teams – a team from Nashville and a team of college students from Southwest Baptist University.  The first day was spent trying to sort through all the donations that had been brought by all the teams, the gifts that WAEM had purchased with donated funds, and  donations that had been mailed to the Dream Center over the previous month.  Needless to say, there was a lot of things to sort. We also helped load up a lot of gifts with some leaders from the Northern Arapaho tribe.  Every year they come down to pick up gifts to take to the people on the Wind River Reservation. The needs are great on so many of the reservations in the US.

The crowd at Billy Mills Hall

On Sunday night, we had our first distribution event at the Billy Mills Hall in the town of Pine Ridge on Pine Ridge Rez.  Over 300 hundred individuals came out for the event which lasted a couple of hours.  There were music groups and drama presentations from the SBU team.  A Lakota man, Tim Whiteface, shared his testimony in song and word.  And then, let the chaos begin!  Organized chaos but still chaotic.  We served elder bags first to all men and women over the age of 60.  It is very important in the Lakota culture to respect the elders.  After that, children were called by their gender and age to line up and receive their gifts.  There were a ton of items and although we wished we could give everyone an equal gift, we could not.  We also ran out which broke our hearts.  But Lori and Gary Mcafee, WAEM leaders, made a promise to come back out and bring some more in a couple of days.  Most of our guys from FBC worked security in the parking lots – protecting vehicles and the building from graffiti.  Although sad, this is a daily reality of the hard life on the reservation.

On Monday, we prepped gifts again during the day and that night held another large distribution at the Porcupine school in the town of Porcupine.  Hundreds came out again to sing Christmas songs, to hear testimony from Tim and others, and to receive gifts.  On this night, I believe we were able to provide every person with a gift of some kind.

On Tuesday, we sorted the remainder of the gifts and then drove to various communities.  Everything is spread out on the reservation so it might be easy to miss a pocket of people.  We traveled to Potato Creek, Manderson, and Wounded Knee and gave out gifts from the trailer.  Santa was with us as well to bring smiles to the children.

Wednesday morning the team headed out at 5:30 am for the long trek home, arriving back at the church at 10:30 pm.  It was a trip full of blessings and education.  We had a chance on Tuesday morning to take our team to the Lakota Cultural Center at the Oglala Lakota College which was very educational and informative not only of the history of the Lakota but also the progress that the college is making on the Reservation.  We then traveled to Wounded Knee to visit the massacre site and the memorial grave.  Today, December 29th, is the 120th anniversary of  the massacre at Wounded Knee.  It is a somber place but we grieve just as much for the battle that is currently waging on the reservation – a battle of poverty, hopelessness and despair.  We are blessed to partner with such an amazing couple that serves God and labors on behalf of the Lakota people every day of their lives. We have so much to learn but it begins with that first step.  We hope that maybe you will join us on our future trips to Pine Ridge in June 2011 and December 2011.

You can view all of our pictures here.

Recently, we have had two articles published about our involvement in mission partnerships.

Word and Way Newspaper

The first was a feature article about Dr. Lory Feeler, team leader for our partnership with Servant’s Heart Ministries in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.  Dr. Feeler has been a doctor for many years in our community and was just honored in May as a Zonta Woman of Achievement.  The local magazine, Jefferson City Magazine, published an article about her love and passion for our partnership in the Dominican Republic.  You can read about it here.  Our latest team returned from the Dominican Republic at the end of June.

The most recent article was published today in the Word and Way, a Baptist newspaper committed to accurately informing Baptists and others of relevant news, to promoting the work of Christ and encouraging inspirational living.  They included a short article about our partnership with Wings as Eagles Ministries on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  We were so blessed to spend a week with them in June.

Enjoy this great articles celebrating what God is doing and please forward them along to others so they can learn about these great partners.