Sometimes you seek out ministry, other times it finds you

It’s Sunday and Sacred Ground-Mesa is closed, but the man standing at the door looked desperate.

He had traveled into Phoenix for a court date, not realizing that all of the courts were shut down due to the pandemic, and had been stranded there for four days. He had no ride back to his home on the reservation, a 45-minute car ride away, where his girlfriend and five kids were waiting for him.

While sleeping on the streets, he heard about a place in Mesa that helps Native people. As he walked toward Sacred Ground-Mesa, he hoped someone would be there to help him but as he got closer he noticed the windows were dark. He sat down outside the building to figure out what he was going to do.

A car pulled into the parking lot.

The three LIM missionaries in the car, Rick, Deon, and Kyonia, arrived at the building to set up for an upcoming Sacred Story seminar. There was paperwork to finish, seating to organize, and general preparation to be done for the group of individuals who would arrive the next morning and spend the week telling their stories of trauma, some of them for the first time.

As the group approached the door, the man stood up and asked if there was any way he could get a ride home. Otherwise, he was going to have to start walking.

Despite the long list of items the group needed to accomplish that night, they dropped everything to drive the man home to his family, down the freeway and the dirt road that led into the community. On their way, they stopped at the local food pantry and picked up to-go meal boxes for him and the six individuals waiting for him on the reservation.

“Driving on to the reservation was a wake-up call for me,” explains Deon Prue, ministry leader at Sacred Ground-Haskell. “I’ve been on reservations before, but none like this. I've seen the poverty and the desolation, but those I’ve visited have at least a corner store to get groceries. This reservation was simply four rows of generic, white, government houses.”

Inside the house, the family was overjoyed to see the man and the dinner the group had brought. The girlfriend explained she had been trying to figure out what to feed the children because she hadn’t been able to get to a town with a grocery store since the man had been gone.

“It was hard to see this family who had never been given a chance to succeed,” Deon remembers. “They live on the reservation because it’s home (the woman had grown up on this reservation), not to mention it’s free housing, but there aren’t any jobs or resources for them. They could move to Phoenix, but they have no job training, no housing, no money to make the move, and no support system. On top of that, the homeless shelters and residential houses we work with don’t accept children.”

After the LIM ministry staff had delivered the man back to his home, they made their way back to Sacred Ground-Mesa to prepare for the week.

“On the way back to Mesa, we decided to stop at a restaurant for dinner,” Rick McCafferty, Director of Healing Programs, notes. “The first restaurant we came to was a country club surrounded by a luxurious green golf course. I couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast to the home we had just been in. Over dinner, we processed what we had just experienced and came to the conclusion that we needed to do something more for this family.”

As it usually happens, the next day came, and the group got caught up in the day-to-day work that comes with hosing a seminar, but the family never left their thoughts and prayers.

Finally, on Thursday, Rick, Deon, and Kyonia, now joined by Joe Lundstrum, Director of Education at Sacred Ground - Mesa, were able to return to the house on the reservation. On the way, they stopped at a toy store and a grocery store to load the car with groceries, goodies, and baby needs (three of the five children were still in diapers).

“When we showed up at their door, the woman burst into tears,” Deon recalls. “She was shocked and so grateful. I’m sure she thought she’d never see us again. It was a really wonderful thing to watch the kids play and the parents so excited to stock their refrigerator.”

The experience is one that this LIM group will never forget. It can be hard to see all of the need in our world, and overwhelming when we don’t know where to start. Often we feel the need to seek out opportunities to help, but sometimes ministry comes knocking on your door.