God is good, but I nearly missed it — nearly missed seeing his goodness.
I was looking the other way, looking up to the people at the top, envying the wicked who have it made, who have nothing to worry about, not a care in the whole wide world.
Pretentious with arrogance, they wear the latest fashions in violence.  Pampered and overfed, decked out in silk bows of silliness.  They jeer, using words to kill; they bully their way with words.  They’re full of hot air, loudmouths disturbing the peace.  People actually listen to them — can you believe it?  Like thirsty puppies, they lap up their words?
What’s going on here?  Is God out to lunch?  Nobody’s tending the store.  The wicked get by with everything; they have it made, piling up riches.
I’ve been stupid to play by the rules; what has it gotten me?
A long run of bad luck, that’s what — a slap in the face every time I walk out the door.

Well, that’s the first half of Psalm 73 (The Message translation), but I didn’t do it with quotes.  I put it in my own voice, because I didn’t want to just quote it. (more…)

Many of the Danes in northeastern Montana arrived there only after significant temporary settlement in other states.
As the Danes arrived at Ellis Island in significant numbers in the 1890s, they enjoyed temporary welcome in Brooklyn and then went on to Iowa and Nebraska and Wisconsin.
For some, that second landing point became their lifelong home. For others, it was the place where they worked for years to put together cash to move on and buy land elsewhere, and during that time most of them started families, built churches and schools,  and became American citizens. When the calling to greener grass and adequate cash met up, they packed their saws, their smithing tools, their few household goods, and their children and moved on.
My maternal grandparents’ interim landing point was Racine, Wisconsin, where their first five children were born before moving on to greener pastures in Montana (now that’s an allegorical phrase if there ever was one–if you know anything about the nature of northeastern Montana).  My paternal grandparents’ interim landing point was a little village about five miles from Aurora, Nebraska. (more…)

Mailboxes along the roads
and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds
often served as landmarks in rural Montana.
These landmarks told us where we were,
and how far we had to go.
Sometimes they signaled “home”  and the end of the road.
At other times,
barely visible through swirling snow,
they told us we had miles to go.
When I started writing the word pictures to tell the stories of growing up on the farm, I realized that these stories, just like those barns and mailboxes that stood along our country roads, still identify places on the road, still seem to inform me about  where I am and how far I have to go. 
In 1953 and 1958, refrigerator surfaces were not used to display family pictures, notes from grandchildren, or school photos of second graders held in place by cute little magnets.
The kitchen was a place of intense activity with cupboard doors, refrigerator doors, and oven doors being opened and shut a hundred times a day in the process of baking, cooking, setting meals, cleaning up after meals, thawing meat out for tomorrow’s meals and spreading out Farm Journals and handwritten recipes to plan new desserts and vegetable dishes for the next big family gathering.  It was a great day when the ladies discovered that crumbled potato chips made for a great topping on almost any casserole. Lots to learn.  Lots to enjoy.
Mom ordered a copy of Cooking with Gail, a suitable cookbook for a youngster.  Gail was a farm girl in Iowa whose mother was teaching her the homemaking arts, step by step.  They gathered the recipes and the instructions in a simple spiral bound cookbook that was sold through the Farm Journal. To this day, her directions for apple pie and for simple chicken/turkey dressing are what gets it done in my kitchen..
The kitchens of those day sputtered, boiled, melted, froze, pureed, fried, baked, creamed and processed all manner of photogenic goodies, almost 24/7, year round, but neither the kitchens nor the refrigerators were considered the place to display valued family photos. (more…)

I attended high school at a Lutheran boarding school 180 miles from our Montana farm for reasons of convenience and opportunity. Our parents were tired after chasing kids,   for over thirty years by that time, and besides that, there was a top notch choral program there that provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in music.

At some point during my first couple of years there, I wanted to send a card to my Granny in Montana.  I didn’t know her address, but she lived in the lovely little town with tree-lined streets and a big cattle auction ring in the Yellowstone River Valley, a place where they actually had irrigation systems with small canals accessing the rich farmland all around the town.  They also had wells that gave usable water, drawn from a fairly high and constant water table.  Even the people who lived on the farms spread out around the town had green lawns all summer.  It was remarkable.

The farms were surrounded by flocks of sheep and fields of sugar beets that fed the equipment at the Sugar Beet Factory south of town that provided employment to generations of strong men whose parents and grandparents settled the valley.  The histories of all of these good people were recorded by folks in the community and published under the fine title, Courage Enough in 1975. (more…)

(Via Breitbart)  Just as public anxiety about the weak border security provisions in the Senate immigration bill was building, GOP Sen. Bob Corker stepped forward with an amendment to “fix” the problem. The result of his efforts, however, has been a “christmas tree” measure, covering items far beyond border security. Breitbart News has learned exclusively that one provision of Corker’s amendment will allow workers who stay in the country past their visa will remain on the “path to citizenship.”

Even in the future, breaking the law won’t stop progress on what VP Joe Biden calls the “unfettered path” to citizenship.

The Corker Amendment ostensibly addresses measures to beef up border security. It, however, is also likely to be the last amendment considered on the immigration bill. As such, it has become a 1,000+ page amendment to supplant the current proposal and provide multiple new provisions. It has become the vehicle for ObamaCare 2.0.

Buried within the text of the Amendment is a seemingly innocuous provision:

(f) APPLICABILITY OF CERTAIN GROUNDS OF INADMISSIBILITY.—In determining an alien’s inadmissibility under this section, section 212(a)(9)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(9)(B)) shall not apply.

What does that mean?  (more…)

My older brother whose teen years were in the last half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s remembered bringing water from a well two miles away, in barrels, on a stone boat pulled through the dirt by a team of horses.

He described our water as precious to begin with, and then “…the more it was handled the more valued it became.  We first pumped the water out of the well, hauled it home and dumped it in a cistern, then pumped it back out and carried it into the kitchen for Mother, or in for bathing and washing, and then we carried what remained afterward to the garden or to the pigs.”

Around 1949 or 1950, there were two massive pigs in the 20 X 20 pig pen down behind the barn. They had to be slopped daily and their names were Nicodemus and Yellow Hammer. (more…)

The long run. The lifelong commitment.  The big picture. The foundational truths. These are the elements that feed the reactors that are burning deep within the hearts and minds of those who make a difference, whether or not they are flamboyant as they do it.  Such  people are deliberately self-aware but not self-conscious, because their focus is on what desperately needs to be done in response to what others are doing.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is the title by Eric Metaxas that documents the short life and astounding work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who lived all four of those identities to the full.

It is a mistake to think of Hitler having a meteorically sudden rise to power, and it is a great misreading of events to think that those who actively resisted him did so out of the anxiety of a moment, implementing plans only drawn up under the pressure of we must do something right now.  Bonhoeffer and and others who actively resisted both inside and outside of government and military service, were far more thoughtful than such a perception would suggest.

What follows is a two page excerpt from Metaxas’ 2010 biography and may provide some food for thought as we find our places in our own national mess, perhaps feeling as he did, that we have so little ground under our feet because of the entrenched betrayals and deceptions that are dissolving the world as we knew it. (more…)