Pine Ridge Reservation - Part 1

AP file photo shows the entrance to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. AP

I read an article about a month ago that broke my heart.  It was an article about the children and teens in Pine Ridge Reservation, on the southern edge of South Dakota.  The suicide rate there is 400% the national average, and they had recently seen a spike in that rate, with kids as young as 12 years old killing themselves.  They ask for people to pray for the spiritual warfare that is taking place in this area.

I have a dear friend, who is Native American, and she recently rededicated her life to Christ.  So, I called her up and we planned to pray for the reservation every day for the next month.  Each day, we called each other and prayed fervently for the people of Pine Ridge, the elders, the parents, the children, the teens.  We asked God to deliver them for the bondage of generational sin, addiction, and abuse.  We bound desperation, depression, and suicide in Jesus name!  Over and over we came together and lifted up the Indian tribes around the Nation, that God would move his mighty hand and deliver them, save them, reclaim them as His own.



In the course of the month, my friend and her husband ended up moving out to California.  She relocated and started looking for a new church.  The second church she attended ended up being a great fit for her, and she attended a Bible Study there.  She asked them to pray for Pine Ridge, and one of the ladies told her their church has a ministry that works with the reservations and she gave her a website.

About a week later we connected on our phones to again pray, but before we started my friend told me that she had finally gone to the website and checked it out.  What she found floored me...  The ministry was started by a man from her new church.  He had been ministering directly to the Pine Ridge Reservation!!!  That is so amazing considering the distance between the church and the reservation.  Not only that, but he died December of 2013.  He was driving home from Pine Ridge Reservation and hit black ice, flipping his car, and died.  He was passing through a dangerous stretch of interstate 80, right outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming!!!  That is the same EXACT SPOT one year later that my family hit black ice, flipped our car, and THANK YOU JESUS, LIVED!!!! (Click here to read my story).

When she told me that, I sat in my car just in stunned silence.  Wow.  Crazy coincidence?  Or somehow piecing together something amazing by God.  Well, just wait, it gets better!!!

We decided to keep praying into this, because clearly, God was working here.  Then a couple weeks later I'm putting my kids to bed and my dad calls me.  I get on the line and he says "You'll never guess who I just met."  I take the bait, "Who?".  He says "I'm sitting here at a table at a restaurant in Kearney, NE when a guy comes and asks if I'd share my table.  I say sure, and I find out he is a missionary at Pine Ridge Reservation!!"  WHAT!?!?!??  That's just crazy!!  He was just passing through, and happened to sit down at the table with my dad!!

So, I got on the phone with him and told him about how we had been praying and everything.  He told me that the kids that month had made a big suicide pact to all do it on the same night.  But, someone found out about it and they got it stopped.  PRAISE GOD, the one who saves!!! 

The people of Pine Ridge Reservation are not out of the woods yet, but we were so thankful to hear an answer to our prayers!!  We will continue to pray for them, and we are so excited to see what doors God opens to us.  We just think He has something else for us to do here.  So this is Part 1.  Stay tuned, join us in prayer, and open up your faith to expect the impossible, amazing things only God can do.  Amen!!