Tikkun Olam Team Member Highlight - Hannah Struttmann
This blog post is written by Hannah! I will answer the questions asked in mostly narrative style. That style will make this a long blog post, but hopefully one that gives you a fully colored-in picture of the lives on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, my life, and God’s work here.
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During my senior year of college, I meditated on this passage: “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. (Matthew 9:37-38)
And from deep within me, I cried out: “Lord! Send me!”
And He did—I felt so compelled to go somewhere. I did not yet know where, but I was not far from finding out. (From my own experience, I think that arriving at a place of yielded-ness and readiness for the Father’s will takes the most time. A heart prepared for obedience takes much longer for the Lord to cultivate in my own life than the mere hearing and obedience itself.) I prayed that I would be sent to a place where I could use my ability as a teacher to build relationships in a community that had great need for the gospel. I prayed to find a like-minded Christian community of believers who wanted to use their abilities in a similar way. I felt that I needed to go to some reservation, and over time, through prayer, the Lord made it clear that He intended to send me to Wolf Point, Montana. I joined Tikkun Olam and accepted a 1st grade position at Southside Elementary in the fall of 2018.
I loaded up my belongings that summer and crossed the Montana border for the first time. I was startled by the amount of land and lack of people! I had never been in such a rural area before.
The Living God did answer my prayers by leading me here. Sure enough, I built good relationships with students, families, and believers by working as a teacher and coach and by serving in a church. I have also found great support in the family of Tikkun Olam members as well as believers in the local churches.
I began teaching 1st grade. I relish the opportunity to welcome children into a loving, stable (as much as I can make it) environment, in which they can be encouraged and grow. My favorite part of the day is welcoming my students into my classroom in the morning. Teaching provides many opportunities to encourage and nurture the children. I also have the opportunity to model and teach about love, self-discipline, conflict resolution, forgiveness, kindness, patience, respect, and many other things….and there are some opportunities to speak about the Lord to students. That is the best thing.
I began coaching cross country and track. I enjoyed stepping into a coaching role after my own years of running and racing. I encouraged the kids (5th-12th grade) and listened to their stories as I ran beside them. Coaching gave me a much better lens and voice into their lives, as running together naturally lends itself to good conversations. It also gave me the chance to get to know their parents as they came to the meets.
I chose a church in town and began a Sunday school for kids. More women in the church help with it now, and I find that I come alive passing along the truths of God to the young hearers.
One of the beauties of small-town living is that time interactions with students, runners, and families are not confined to school grounds and practice times. I get to chat with them when I see them at the grocery store, when I go for a run through town, or when the kids wander by on their way to the playground. In the summertime, children will sometimes knock at the door to see if I am available to spend some time with them.
Those are a few glimpses of how the Lord has placed me in this community and given me opportunities to know their stories, serve them, and point them to Him.
In the meantime, transitioning to life in rural Montana on a reservation widened and deepened my perspective of the Native Americans themselves, the world, and of God Himself.
On one hand, I was shocked…despair and hopelessness are much more blatant on the reservation than in other places I had been. Dilapidated homes, stories of broken families, a swamped foster system, and the deaths of two of the runners I have coached opened my eyes to the brokenness of the world and forced me to face the reality of the sorrow, pain, death, and hopelessness in the world.
Yet through that, my perspective of God deepened as I realized the more of the goodness of the Suffering Servant, Jesus, who was no stranger to suffering. He did not just want to fix our situation from the outside; He came and dwelt among us, bearing our suffering, then offering us healing and victory (and many other things, of course). This helped me to realize the depth of His love in a way that I had not before.
Additionally, I gained immense respect for some who live here, relying on the Lord in hope and upholding their families. I think of a woman from my church who is raising her four grandchildren up in the Lord and passionately praises the Lord through her hardships. Many people similar to her on this reservation have a strength that I greatly admire.
My perspective widened as I spoke with Native Americans who follow their traditional spirituality. One woman told me that she does not know the attributes of the god she prays to. She simply said that he created everything, but she could not tell me what she thinks her god is like. Those conversations awakened me to the goodness of the fact that we know the attributes of the God we love—loving, , gracious, just, trustworthy, good….just to name a few. Through those conversations, the Holy Spirit birthed in me an urgency and burden that these people know the treasure of the God that I know, who longs for them to know Him.
After spending two years on the reservation, I returned to Colorado for a year. However, I felt that I was withholding my all from God. Additionally, the Lord kept that urgency and burden within me, so I was compelled to return to the reservation. I am now spending my third year here over a four-year span.
I returned with greater focus than I had the first time. When I left the reservation, I realized that most of my energy, spent on helping people in a predominantly humanitarian sense (just being kind and helping meet physical and educational needs), while certainly helpful and beneficial at the time, seemed to spur on no lasting effect beyond my presence there. Its impact, while real in my presence there, ended when I left. In contrast, the spiritual seeds sown had a longer lasting effect, because it pointed people to the true and continual source of life, transformation, and hope that is abundantly and eternally beyond what I could offer. As a result, my focus is now more focused on the spiritual edification of the people than before: pointing them to the source (God) themselves, instead of merely letting them lap up the overflow (love, care, generosity, service) from my own heart and life.
My aims in my time here are to continue to grow in knowledge and love of the Lord, to continue to grow in the ways He desires, and to be closely yoked to Him in the work that He is presently doing here, through prayer and action.
My hope for the people in the Wolf Point community and the Fort Peck Native American Reservation at large is anchored in that promise: that glimpse into the future of people of each language, tribe, and nation worshipping before our God (Revelation 7:9-12; many other verses). I know that the Lord will continue to redeem, restore, and transform people of these tribes, the Sioux and Assiniboine, as He will peoples in all the earth. My faith is anchored in that glimpse, it compels me (doesn’t it compel you, too?) to be written into that story.
My prayers (and I would love for you to join me in these prayers):
That they would know the God who loves us, came to dwell with us, and longs to dwell with us with increasing closeness day by day.
That God’s word would continue to be sent out over this reservation, healing many (Psalm 107).
That our (all of us on the reservation, and all of us in general) thirst to know God would increase (John 7:37-38; Revelation 22:17).
That the Lord would cast out many more laborers into this field of harvest, as He did to me.
Love,
Hannah
