Someone Has to Say It

 

 









 

Someone has to name what is going on so it can start to be addressed. Someone has to start talking about it.

Dear Church, Environmentalists, Social Justice seekers,

The people and the land are hurting…bad.

This is going to be on two subjects that rarely are placed in the same place these days: Spirituality and the physicality of the  land. There are very few people in the Church or among environmentalists that combine the two. We have a mess that needs help and it impacts us all.

This will stretch your spirituality, this will burden your heart, this has rocked me to the core and those that catch a glimpse of it; brace yourself. Open your heart if you pray. Open your mind if you don’t. The two are connected.

Our riversides and waterways have been getting sick. The soil is sick and man has been destroying himself.  Environmentalists, I know you are listening. Church, listen! I was walking with a friend who pointed out all of the buckthorn growing in a Refuge. Among it were plantings, weeds, unproductive plant life under the guise of “forest” depleting the soil and choking out this 300 year old oak. “This oak knew the elk, the bison, the carrier pigeon and the people who lived beneath it.” My heart was pierced. “This all used to be savannah,” he said.

I prayed. I prayed for two days asking God to help me with this. I grew up in a conservative home; one of faith, but one of progress, science and financial acquisition.  The things that somehow foreshadowed me back then for what I am burdened and passionate for today was that I had a painting of Jesus over my childhood twin bed and a decal of the Ecology flag I put on my bed room window by the shelves of the plants I grew in the south facing window instead of using my allowance to buy candy.

I walk in a relationship with God where I hear Him speak. To some of you who may be environmentalists: Yes, I’m being for real. To some of you who are the Church: Yes, I’m being for real. He speaks.

This is what He said, “As the Nation cries out for repentance, they have been going up the wrong trees. Repentance needs to go back to the Land and what was done to the people on it and the blood that was shed.” Our brothers and sisters!  This is what has been a two year journey that God has taken me on, reworking my mind and heart to see as He does through the very people of this land who are BOTH Spiritual AND Land honoring.

This is the time to write in short, the plea to see!

I have just returned from Standing Rock. Please, listen.

This is more than about the pipeline; it’s that the pipeline is bringing our attention to this place that God wants us to see. It’s about the water, the people and the land. It’s a microcosm of the whole and how we have been doing things and why.

The rivers are where life is derived from. Water. We need it to live. We are made mostly of water. Church, the places of great events and life and living happened on the rivers. The Nile, the Euphrates, the Jordan. The Egyptian writings are there in the hieroglyphs. Life, people, history, culture, worship and ancestry happened there. We tour there to see where Jesus was baptized, the Sea of Galilee where they fished, the Nile and its ancient cities and reflect at times gone by.

First Nations people lived along the rivers here. Ancient writings are in the petroglyphs around this country. Life, people, history, culture, worship and ancestry happened here with the same thousands of years worth of history. We are appalled at the decimation of sacred places taking place in the Middle East. It’s happening here. Paleontologists have sites in Standing Rock. From a building devoted to it and a Casino with dinosaur bones displayed in a window shelf along with ancestral artifacts to name a few. This is one reservation. And bulldozers have been tearing apart the land as its dust rises up.

Do a search on the Cannonball River. Read the history. The tribes spanning centuries of life and death and life again along that river that flows into the Missouri River is historic and ancestral and part of families’ heritage. I have driven between Bismarck, North Dakota and Standing Rock. The route is altered because of the pipeline and protest site. The drive takes an hour. Driving through mostly prairie between hills, and badland rock formations, and mountains far in the distance; this drive through this land has few dwellings. Then, entering in, one can see the pipeline area. It is in the area of these men and women’s history; the Cannonball River, the Missouri River, Lake Oahe and in easy eyeshot is the greatest concentration of Standing Rock citizens’ homes, businesses and Tribal Government center. To say this pipeline location is not infringing is a gross lie. It is before them after driving an hour’s span of miles from a town and land that rejected the pipeline, past vast spaces with little to no dwelling areas to be horrifically displayed in the very backyard of lives and living of the people of the community of Standing Rock. The land the pipeline is on is scarcely beyond the shrunken border of what is currently a broken Treaty, and in blatant eyesight of those who have their lives there and derive their life from these waters. It is upsetting in every way to a culture that lives with the land and honors it. Who in faith see spiritually the land, its life, and their own all connected by a Creator, a culture and people that regards with great respect, ancestors, heritage and that they survived nearly being destroyed.

The Standing Rock youth began to protect their water. Environmental protectors arrived. Social Justice protectors arrived, people from Tribes all over the country arrived and those who pray. Some came in with arrogance and rude behavior that exasperated and antagonized the police force called in. It was not the intent of the people of Standing Rock to behave like that. Theirs was a call to honor, prayer and a peaceful protest because of the priority of remaining humble. One of the Tribal members prays for her people and their families and prays for the police and their families and the governing people and their families. It is a blanket of honor of love and the desire that all would see one another and be one in that kind of love. Even among the tanks, armored trucks, pepper spray, helicopters and psychological intimidation that has been brought into this place of what must have been seen as  out of the way and no one will notice. The people who live in Standing Rock insisted on prayer. That this has received the attention it has and the support it has must be an act of God. So many other land atrocities have been swept under the rug.

I believe with all my heart God is saying, “Look!”

Many argue that it is within the legal rights of private land to run this pipeline. Whose legal rights, I ask? Which Government?

The land is sacred to people who have lived off of it in honor and understanding that as the earth lives, so do they. As Creator created us He created this living land. The Church let go of that.

Repentance.

Isaiah 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
 

The Cannonball River is the border between the Nation of Standing Rock and the European occupation of Turtle Island, now called the United States of America and in particular, North Dakota. These words may be foreign to you. We didn’t get taught our true history. We heard about settlers coming, the Gold Rush expanding the west and immigrants seeking a better life.

Why?

They wanted to come to a new land and to gain wealth They came under the guise of Manifest Destiny.

Please listen. Church, listen please, I beg you.

Manifest Destiny is a spirit; an evil one. Europeans partnered with this thing and tried to call it good. Coming here to settle and tame the land and live off its riches at the expense of those already living here.  Jesus said in John 10:10 “The Thief comes to steal, kill and destroy, I have come to give life and life abundantly.”

Land was taken for wealth, gold, silver and the best hunting and farming grounds, promises broken, people killed and cultures nearly destroyed. Manifest Destiny is a spirit not of Christ, but of Satan. In the spiritual part of my knowledge of generational spiritual strongholds, I asked God to deliver me from Manifest Destiny. He did. I felt a softening within my muscles as a sense of striving left me and a far deeper peace and contentment came upon me. My mind yielded and a sense of bull-headedness left me. Cooperation, listening, compassion, sharing and giving became strengthened. Yes, really.

I told my son about it and asked if he would want to be prayed for and be delivered from it if it was a part of him. He agreed. As I prayed and God touched him, he relaxed next to me. The very next day he came home from school and said, “Mom, guess what?! We learned about Manifest Destiny today! America was horrible.”

Now the land and atmosphere is being compromised for oil and people are put down for money.

We are seeing what is happening to our water. Kids try to take a drink with a cup at the beach and we knock it away and say, "Don't drink that!" Soil is contaminated with pesticides and more. We’ve seen extinctions. Now we are seeing dramatic weather changes that are affecting us all. Environmentalists can’t sleep at night listening to the premature snow melting and dripping from roofs. They know the value of the land and how we are all dependent on it. We need a miracle. We all need to pray and repent for what we have done to this land and what we have done to one another and get set free from the evils that have been driving us to our own destruction.

My friend is on his fifth tour of running/walking across the United States with the American Indian Movement’s Longest Walk 5.2. It will be completed again in Washington DC in July 2017. Currently in Nevada, he recently spent time on the Paiute-Shoshone Reservation where he said they have a sad history of nuclear waste and testing/flight practices. Our brothers’ and sisters’ scarce portions of land retained, is used by the U.S. Government to experiment on for weapons of destruction. Water is at a minimum and somehow, the Paiute-Shoshone have managed to remain there and survive. One text he sent came alone. The words, “Man is destroying himself.”

A piece about the Paiute-Shoshone Nye County written in the Las Vegas Review Journal  by Keith Rogers, posted January 11, 2014 reads: Time has left its mark on the land. From etchings in stone and symbolic paintings left on walls of wind caves by Ancient American Indians to remnants from gold and silver mines, to hundreds of pock marks- subsidence craters- from underground nuclear weapons tests, Nye County’s past and recent history are preserved in its landscape.

Everything we have comes from the Earth; physically everything. Spiritually, we have a gage or conscience that knows mostly what is right or wrong. If we see a child about to fall off of something we run and try to catch them before they do. We have a sense for the value of well-being and life. It’s within us, an invisible. Another invisible is that sense that wells up for social justice; identifying evil and desiring what is right and good and fair. This is spirituality with a winning side where the majority of humans ultimately want what’s right. God, a good God, our Creator and Savior Yeshua is intertwined as He taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  

In an article that tried to switch focus from the pipeline, they wrote about the trash accumulated at the protest camp. The words were that when the snow melts and the river floods, all those people who say they are environmentalists and protesting the protection of the water, are going to be polluting it.

I was just there. The clean-up is done.

The real clean-up needs to be done within ourselves, created in the image of God and living with one another on this one extraordinary place of living earth where our own lives and our children's are dependent.

I watched Indigenous people repent out loud for things they did to each other, for wrongful worship of animism, witchcraft, and for unforgiveness, anger etc. People stood in the gap for abuse, addictions and more. A man who came from Ireland repented for the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and the religious spirit and abuses that came through and stood in the place of that. It was powerful. We will see something come of this. Standing Rock, in its very name, carries prophetic things.  Psalm 18:2 Yahweh/the LORD is my solid rock, my fortress, my rescuer. My God is my rock- I take refuge in Him! He's my shield, my salvation's strength, my place of safety.

Church, listen to this verse again. It has been your battle cry when you have been crying out for the Nation’s repentance.

2 Chronicles 7:14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Environmentalists, the Word in the Bible agrees with what you see and know in regards to the land. The head knowledge is also His heart. You are a blessing as you have persevered against financial greed and work to bring about restoration. The ways of what was first instilled is what works. Grazing kept the healthy cycle for soil, plants, water and animal life. Destroying nearly to extinction, the bison and the people living along the waters, has us environmentally feeling it now. Industrialization brought productivity and also produced pollution that is having detrimental effects.

This is a link to some experiments regarding reintroduction to grazing. Our thoughts need to return to what was and what worked and learn from the original design. Observing nature can teach us so much. A man says he learned how to lead by watching his horses. He is a pastor and has been leading many to Christ by following the way of leadership he learned from his horses.  

Isaiah 32:20 ESV “Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free.”

Praying, humbling ourselves, turning from wicked ways, listening, efforts to understand cultures and love one another and truly observing and honoring the LORD and this living earth; God says He will heal this land. First Nations people  humbled themselves at the Inter-Tribal Prayer Gathering and Indigenous Healing the Land Conference at Standing Rock last week. We are believing in Him for His word.

May we all begin to look and see and understand right up to our President, so that when the Church cries out in repentance regarding the Nation, that it goes back to the depths of the heart of God where He has not forgotten those whom He had first established the Nations on this land.

Romans 8:19-21 ESV  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain freedom of the glory of the children of God.
 

The more you read and research the history of indigenous people along the rivers and waterways, and study environmental research and search your own heart, you will see. Start a relationship or renew one with God. Pray. We can’t do this without Him. He loves us all. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

·        If you are feeling prayerful, listen to this song “Called by My Name” by Robby Cummings. It was sung by he and Alex Costillo in worship at the Inter-Tribal Prayer Gathering and Indigenous Healing the Land Conference at Standing Rock March 3-7, 2017