Kentucky

After staying the night in Charleston, WV we’re going to Pure Life Ministries today (October 4^th) to look at the campus and meet Brother Bill.  Dan spent six months at PLM’s live-in Christian counseling program before coming to Houghton in 2005. Brother Bill was a mentor and counselor to Dan during that time. PLM is 45 minutes south of Cincinnati, OH in the middle of the country side, surrounded by small tobacco farms, dried up gullies, and small groves of trees nestled between the hills. 

At the Kentucky welcome center on I-64 west, we asked which route we should take to get to Dry Ridge, the closest town to PLM.  The woman working there told us to take Route 9 most of the way and then go the final stretch on county roads.  Route 9 was like a highway out of the 50’s with no divider in the middle, a large shoulder and double lanes every once in a while.  Once we got to the county roads, we had to go about 35 mph the whole way to follow the serpentine contours of the landscape.

Route 22 in Kentucky.  The forested areas are usually gullies.  The road and cultivated land are located where the ground is level enough to farm.

 

PLM has grown since Dan graduated in February 2005. Several new buildings including a dining hall and a new set of rooms called the Annex. Dan showed me the prayer trails in the woods that go down to the bottom of the rocky gullies. We saw a parachuting spider in the field, whose web was caught in the sun’s rays. Since all of the men were at work during the day, the campus had only a few men walking around. We met and talked to William Thornton, a fellow graduate from Dan’s same year, and then Brad Whitney who told us that Ed Buch and he were also counselors. 

We put Istra on her leash so she could explore around the campus while we waited for Bill. She walked around only with much hesitation and when Bill’s landscaping truck drove up, she tried to run back to the car dragging me behind her as fast as I could go. We didn’t try to take her out again there, though she happily passed the night with us in the spacious guest apartment. 

Bill met us after he got back from a full day of mowing. Bill serves as the maintenance director, as well as counseling a few men, so he gets to be outdoors much of the time. He was very welcoming and gave us a tour, a place to stay for the night, and invited us to join him and the men for dinner in the dining hall. Incidentally, the men were all on a talk fast the day we arrived as a discipline to gain time for reflection and prayer in order to prepare for an upcoming guest speaker. So, though the dining room was full of men at supper, it was quite quiet while we spoke with Bill at our corner table. 

 

Bill had invited Dan and I for an early morning walk, so we woke up before the sun rose to be ready to meet him. In order to see the sun rise, we took our bicycles off of the car and rode into the morning mist, which had settled very heavily in the gullies and less so on the roads. Before coming back to meet up with Bill, we got to see the sun come up just like Dan used to when he lived there and drove to work early in the morning. 

 

 

Overall, it was a really pleasant visit. Bill rightly described PLM as a place where people go only when they really need to, so it’s not surprising that I felt pretty strongly that I didn’t belong there. I also think that my love for Dan and earnest prayers for him over these past 6 years have created a very tender place in my heart for the suffering and healing which is part of being delivered from the bondages that men at PLM fight against. It was hard for me to be there, but I was very grateful for the opportunity to experience a community where the Lord gave to Dan the tools of faith and humility that he needed to be freed in Christ.