This past Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024, I drove out of my way home to Kansas City, for 577 miles from St. Simon’s Island, Georgia to Cape Henry, Virginia, in order to read Rev. Robert Hunt’s declaration that he made before stepping on this land for the first time on April 29, 1607. By the time I arrived at 5:30 p.m., the little hut pictured above, was closed. Id’ missed the last tour by an hour and a half. 

In the gathering darkness, I drove to an entrance gate where a young military man stopped me. 

He said, “Do you have a pass to get in here?”

“No, I’ve come to pray on Cape Henry.”

“Sorry, Ma’am. You’ll have to make a U-turn and leave immediately. This is a military instillation. No civilians allowed except by tour between the hours of 10 and 4.”

In my U-turn I snapped this picture of the tourist station. That’s as close as I got to my destination only a few hundred yards away. I parked my car on the first street past the guard house and prayed what Rev. Hunt prayed after he had fasted and prayed for three days before leaving his ship for the first time in this new land. He took some boards out of the side of the ship and formed a cross on Cape Henry and prayed this prayer: 

“We do hereby dedicate this land and ourselves to reach the people within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to raise up godly generations after us, and with these generations, take the Kingdom of God to all the earth. May this covenant of dedication remain to all generations as long as the earth remains, and may this land, along with England, be Evangelists to the world. May all who see this cross remember what we have done here, and may those, who come here to inhabit, join us in this covenant and in this noblest work that the Holy Scriptures may be fulfilled. From these very shores, the gospel shall go forth, no only to this New World, but the entire world.”

Almost 417 years have passed since his prayer. I wonder. Have we been an answer to his request?