Participating in the Peace Road 2020
UPF Colorado, together with the Colorado Family Church, organized a Peace Road event on Sunday, August 2, 2020.
We started off with a prayer at the MLK Memorial in City Park Denver, the beginning point for Denver’s annual MLK Day “Marade”.
Adonia Hentrich offered a prayer of repentance and healing for the racial division which Dr King gave his life to redeem. We then proceeded to Grenada in the southeastern corner of the state of Colorado. Grenada was the home of the Amache Japanese internment camp during WWII. Japanese, many of them US citizens, had been forcibly relocated from their homes and businesses on the West coast and placed in camps guarded by the US military. These camps were mostly in remote areas such as this one in an arid and sparsely populated area of Colorado. Our group included some Japanese men and women, some of whom had relatives who had been interned. A prayer was offered by Pastor Michael Hentrich, who has a Japanese mother and an American father.
We then continued on to the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Eads, Colorado. In order to reach Sand creek one must travel down about 10 miles of dirt roads. It is a very remote location. Sand Creek is the site of one of the worst massacres in American history. It was a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army on November 29, 1864, when a 675-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry under the command of U.S. Army Colonel John Chivington attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, killing and mutilating an estimated 70–500 Native Americans, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. A group of five Unificationists women had gathered to pray here when the site first opened 5 years ago and we also gathered to pray. A prayer of healing and repentance was offered by Nancy Bulow, who also read a prayer that had been prepared by one of those who had visited previously. A family of Salvadorans was also at the site and joined us in prayer. The mother told us that she had been called to come on this very day and was so grateful to meet us and to pray with us for the souls of the deceased.
From Sand Creek we returned home to the Denver area. Many expressed gratitude that they could take place in such a meaningful pilgrimage given the current disunity and racial strife in our nation. May Peace Road become a blessing to our nation and our world.