A GREAT PLAINS MINISTRY
Doing God's work in windswept places.
Dan Edmondson
January 1, 1993
Doing God's work in wind-swept places. As my wife and I sat by the pool of our Southern California apartment, she reminisced about how much she enjoyed the tiny town where her grandparents lived-some place in Eastern Colorado. "Bethune, Colorado!" I said. "Come on, honey, you've got to be kidding." Something in my gut told me poking fun of such "out-of-the-way places" was dangerous. After all, God seems to have a special place in his heart for the tiny and the so-called unimportant. I had grown up in the heart of Southern California. On perfect summer days at college, my buddies and I used to sit outside the school library and laugh at the possibility of being called to some windswept place like Kansas or North Dakota-the old "I'll go anywhere you want me to, Lord, just not Africa" syndrome. Yes, the cool spray of the waves crashing beneath Newport Pier and the endless Southern California summer allowed no room for thoughts of ministering in Podunk. Those who ended up in such places were there because they couldn't land the "big jobs" in the cities (or perhaps they got a C in Hebrew). The cramped outback
That was a few years ago. Now as I write, I'm listening to the "outback" wind howl through the cracks in the stained glass of our tiny white church. No, I'm not in Bethune, but close: I'm in Burlington, Colorado, within spitting distance of Kansas. One quarter of our congregation calls Kansas home. The New York Times calls Burlington, "a flat spot near the Kansas border and not much else." Here my family and I now live-far away from the pounding surf. Here in Burlington another way of life exists the way it has for almost 100 years. Here little girls can still walk to school free from fear. Folks can leave their keys in the car (even ...
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