Gathering to Listen #2

The following posts are part of a document written by LK and myself on what has been happened when we gathered to listen.

Ten of us sat around a campfire one warm Arizona evening. We had gathered there with no purpose other than to wait on God and listen to what He wanted to say to us. This was the first of three days of gathering to listen together in the city of Globe, Arizona.

For a while, we waited in silence.  Then D.B. spoke.

 "I just saw a couple of pictures," he said. "The first was of an old Native American leader sitting in the center of a fiery medicine wheel. He was placing a curse on our city. When I asked the Lord why he would do that, He showed me a picture of Native American women and children being thrown down a mineshaft. The old man was overwhelmed with grief and didn’t know what to do except to call on his ancestral spirits for vengeance.

"The second picture was of a house that I recognized as one just a few streets from where I live. It's a very ordinary house to look at from the outside but I saw it has two basements, connected by an elevator.  And in the lowest basement is a swimming pool. There is even an underground passage that leads to the next-door house. In the picture, which looked as though it took place in the 1960s and 70s, there were people I recognized, but much younger. They were partying, doing drugs, wife swapping. It was a very debauched scene."

What were we to make of these pictures? Were they just D.B.'s imagination?  By now we had learned to trust God speaking to people, and so we took them seriously.

Earlier, D.B. had briefed us on the city of Globe, a small town of 7,000 inhabitants on the edge of a Native American reservation. On the reservation, there is a place called Apache Leap, a 200-foot sheer cliff. Its name comes from the story that when the town was first settled, the pioneers took many of the native women and children and threw them off that cliff to be dashed on the rocks below.

The main industry, copper mining, had experienced a downturn over the years.  The small, blue-collar town had experienced some economic depression for quite some time.  In the midst of all this, D.B. runs a coffee shop—one of the few alternatives to bars in town. He is on the city council and has formed friendships with many of the local people. He told us that many murders take place on the Native American reservation and in Globe.  In fact, just a few months before our arrival in Globe, several high school students had committed suicide – four of them were about to graduate.

To be continued…