Entering The Badlands Series

He wrote about the start of a small church plant in the Washington, D.C., suburbs of Maryland. There was much energy generated by the little band of congregants as they went through their first five years of existence. Three years after the congregation was established they went into a building program that lasted for two years. They went from his basement to a very nice building that would seat 300 or so. He wrote that the energy was contagious and the excitement was almost palpable as they worked through all of it.

When the building was finished, Peterson just knew that this was the beginning of the greatest thing that had ever happened to the region. He felt that the sky was the limit! But then he begin to notice about two months after the building was completed, the attendance began to drift downward. People were suddenly finding more important things to do than to grow a church. He said that he would let people miss about six weeks of services and then he would go and seek them out. What he found was troubling to him. He said that not a single one of them were disgruntled, angry, or upset about anything, it was that the goal of building a church had been accomplished and now it was time for them to get involved in something else.

He said that as the malaise spread through the congregation, he said that he could feel the adrenaline slip out of his own soul. He desperately longed to recapture that sense of spirited purpose that had brought them their energy but he could not just seem to do so. He noted that in writing his memoirs and looking back, he was about to enter a time that he called the “badlands” of his life. The other thing that he did not know was that it would last for six years.

How he came up with the concept of the “badlands” was because of a summer trip that he and his family would take every summer from Maryland to Montana. His family lived in Montana and when school was out they would head west. On the way they had to pass through the Dakota Badlands.

Nothing is green or growing. No trees, no water, no towns. The only sign of life was an occasional vulture trolling for something dead and even the vulture was a reminder of death to him. The only thing that interrupted the tedium of the drive was the huge signs telling them to stop at Wall Drugs that was an unlikely oasis in the middle of the Badlands. When you finally got to it, it was a huge structure that resembled a collection of army barracks that had all been merged together in a hodge-podge of construction. He said the only thing appealing about it was the cold soft drinks and ice cream cones that the owners sold.

He wrote that the Badlands was a place that had all the color drained out of it. It could pull energy off of your soul like no other geographical location on the earth could do. He said that was exactly how he felt about things. No life, no energy, no sense of accomplishment, and no purpose.

He said that as the annual pilgrimages were taken, the Dakota Badlands began to preach sermons to him. One year he wrote a poem about it.