South Dakota: Give me a home where the buffalo roam!

“Purple curtain fringed with gold” …that is the way John Greenleaf Whittier described a beautiful sunset day. I think he must have witnessed one like we saw today as we left the Rosebud Indian Reservation and headed back to our hotel.

We started off early this morning meeting with Buck Hill, Director of Missions in the Dakotas, and Garvon Golden, Director of the Dakota Baptist Convention. Our team explored with them avenues through which we might partner in the “Kingdom-work” that God has called each of us to do.

We then traveled about an hour to the town of Sturgis that swells from a population of 6,000 to over 1 million as “bikers” pour in during the first week of August for the largest motorcycle rally in North America. We met with a wonderful church planting husband/wife team, Doug & Dana, and their campus pastor, Jared. In less than 5 years God has used this young couple to start 4 churches and reach over 200 people.

We then traveled another 3 hours through the Badlands to Parmelee, South Dakota where Ron Stroh assisted by Dave Matthews has begun a sewing center with the ultimate goal to employ Native Americans and support a bi-vocational pastor. We met a Lutheran missionary, Andrew, who has encouraged and supported the work at the sewing center, and we were able to travel in an open jeep over rough terrain to view the area… with a “crusty-old” driver named Joe and his dog, “Black Dog.”

It has been a great day eating buffalo burgers and beef tips. But I was reminded as we traveled back watching prairie dogs and antelope frolic on the plains, that He “owns the cattle on a thousand hills” and He yearns to use us to reach the souls of men and women in the Dakotas and around the world.

-Charles