NB – a friend asked me for some more of the NMAI story, and I shared it with him privately, but the more I prayed about it, the more I felt I ought to share it with all other readers as well...
But if you haven’t read that article, none of this will make sense, so I’d read that first if you haven’t.
Q: Why didn’t the police track down Dan’s missing’s person case?
A: Well, the politically-correct, easy answer would be ‘racism’. That old canard that all cops are apathetic and bad and no one cares enough, and you know how that all goes… but the real truth is a little more complex.
Reservations are legally entirely separate from the states they exist within. They have their own semi-autonomous governments and their own police forces. That means that state and local police have zero jurisdiction in reservation lands. Bad guys know this too, and they exploit this. Also rez police don’t like having state police jump in their area and in their business. And of course, state police get territorial too. It’s mostly about egos.
Legally, according to the constitution, only federal police have any jurisdiction in a reservation and honestly, the FBI is mostly just bored with ordinary missing persons stuff. That’s a dime a dozen case, very common and more of a local police thing… so it is an ego bring down to hunt down a boring case where jurisdiction is legally very complex, and most cases simply never get solved. So it has far more to do with FBI egos than FBI racism. They think it’s beneath them, they want a case they can solve easier and that will help them up the ladder. Basically, the legal complexities of the interconnection between two governments can leave a lot of gaps.
Another friend who lives right next to Dan’s White Mountain Apache reservation wrote this:
People go missing and bodies are found stabbed in the alley behind Basha’s. My friend had to retire from the police force because of the terrible things she saw, and now she manages facilities for the school.
Q: This is so sad about Dan. Was he saved?
A: I certainly hope so, and I believe so. Most of what Dan said sounded like yes, he understood the call of Christ and had given himself over to Jesus for salvation, but then some of what Dan said also sounded like classic “Jesus and…” syncretism. This is pretty standard for a lot of native Christians, as they’re worried about getting booted out of their community.
Q: Why did Dan leave so suddenly?
A: Ok, so I was hesitant to open this can of worms, but Dan was also struggling with his sexuality. He never talked about it openly so I didn’t know if I should. However, he shared with me that his understanding of his Catholicism was that Jesus had taught against that. (I said nothing. I was pretty “woke” in those days.) Dan basically espoused the kosher Christian understanding of the past 2000 years. However, living in DC among so many liberal and “affirming” folks was really confusing and alienating to him. That’s one of the reasons Dan said that he needed to leave for home. There were just so many reason that Dan shared about why he simply couldn’t stomach D.C. This was one of them.
Q: What was Dan’s last post about exactly?
A: I don’t have it here in front of me, but I do have a pretty vivid memory of it. Dan’s last post was that he’d had a dream of hell and it freaked him out big time, and so he was renouncing a lot of sexuality lies he’d picked up in DC. He seemed to also be confessing a ton and trying to get right with God… that was posted a few weeks before he disappeared. I personally believe that he did get right with God, but I simply do not know the end of the story. I don’t know who does either…
My post script:
I really regret that I was sort of a bad friend. I hid my faith in those days. I was going by the “a good presence is enough” and you don’t need words.
But you do need words.
Truth was I was a coward who hadn’t been properly discipled in how, when and why to fully share Jesus. It’s definitely a muscle, and it needs training. Everyone is terrible at it at first.
That’s where the discipleship shows up. You need examples, encouragement and engagement to counter the power of shame. The church really needs to showcase what living your faith (by using words) looks like and then let folks imitate it in not so scary ways. I liken it to little kids learning to swim.
Yes, the church has been pretty good at getting many drowning folks on the Jesus boat, but we’ve been terrible at training those same folks how to swim. Yet we shout at them to swim out and rescue the other drowners. So most either stay on the boat… or drown trying to save the other drowners. Or we call drowning “swimming” and congratulate the drowners on ‘swimming in their own way.’
I can’t imagine Jesus is happy with this.