Days 65-67 - Crawford, NE - 1269 miles from home
- Esther Lisa Tishman
- Sep 8
- 4 min read
People. I'm sitting in a spacious church basement, drinking filtered ice water and feasting on the leftovers from two full days of Methodist hospitality. The refrigerator and freezer are literally packed with food for us. There's more food for us stacked on the countertops. Tonight's supper: hamburger with mashed potatoes - but don't forget the cheese and butter and salt and pepper, all smooshed into the taters: this is the carb-iest bowl of delight you could imagine. There may have to be a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup in a few minutes. I'm just saying.
This food is both metaphor and truth. Here in Crawford, at the United Methodist Church led by Pastor Martin Leeper, we've been cradled in love all weekend. There's really no other way to put it. It didn't hurt that this Sunday was first Sunday, when the Church celebrates communion - because generosity like this feels sacramental. To a person, all of our hosts have provided a radical hospitality - and that has felt like a kind of anointing: being blessed with community, being held within a circle of care and concern.
But Crawford UMC takes it one step further, because this food is so seamlessly entwined with words. There's something about the way Pastor Martin inhabits time and story - and not just him, but (as near as I can tell) this whole church family of ranchers and farmers and cellists and grandmas and league bowlers and hikers and teachers and nurses et cetera. Teresa leans agains the sink, getting her crockpot set up, with our dinner roast inside, visiting with us for a spell; Jean tells us about her great grandparents, and her uncle, and her father - and many more kinfolk beside - and readies the side dishes for our first meal in this kindly basement.
And at the same time, as we break bread together, the words shared are often stories of loss - and resilience - and faith. The death of a child; the near-death experience that brought one to Jesus; the miraculous healing of a daughter; the trust regained, through God, in a nearly broken marriage. Here in this church basement there seems to always be enough time for the words to unfurl. Without making a fuss of any of it, Pastor Martin stands in he doorway for as long as the stories and words require - and then, on Sunday, after three long services at the three churches he serves, and an ample fellowship lunch besides... he spends the afternoon with us sharing more stories, and more teaching, and more kindness - inviting us to unfold our own tales.
And then there's dinner with Diane and Webb, and even more stories, and laughter, and I come to see the town and the landscape a bit through their eyes. A vision of the music shop in Chadron - Mar-Bow Archery and Music - where Norman Martin lives upstairs, and the store is still open after all these years. A sense of the town where there used to be the dancehall, and the ranchers would ride in, and there'd be BBQ and picnicking and dancing and camping until morning. A vision of the church camp where fire burned all the canvas tents down, but now fine brick buildings stand in their place. The jail where that crazy local kid busted out, literally, squeezing under the jailer's outstretched arms and ramming his head through a plate glass door.
Perhaps most intensely I begin to understand the presence of the Res within this landscape: Pine Ridge Reservation, bordering to the north just 80 miles away. Although the Pastor spent his early boyhood in Nebraska, his family moved to Bennett County, South Dakota, in 1970. Bennett is in the heart of the Res. Pastor Martin remembers the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 - just as Jean recounts that her great grandfather witnessed the Wounded Knee Massacre itself.
Ultimately Martin Leeper's call to the pulpit cannot, perhaps, be disentangled from this landscape and history. Before he was Pastor Martin, he was Sheriff Leeper - Sheriff of Bennett county, in the middle of the Res - working programs like DARE with native youth, while also navigating relationships with tribal police when the youth's parents and older relatives got in trouble. Sheriffing was not enough, although it was work that he loved. Pastor Martin quotes an old poet on God being the "Hound of Heaven": you're not going to get away from the call, no matter how fast you run, or high you climb up in the tree. "In June of 1999," Pastor Martin tells me, "I hung up my guns and started preaching."
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