It is good to be reminded that our blessings often come disguised as hardship and sorrow, toil and effort. They become blessings only when we stop to consider them, and when we look back to see how far we have come, and how differently things might have been.
My ancestors left behind the land they knew, Iceland, to find a better life for themselves and their children. I wonder if they knew that they were trading one life of hardship for another one.
What they found was often hardship and loss. In the case of my Great-Grandparents, all their family belongings disappeared between the dockyards and the train heading west. They arrived at Duluth, Minnesota, with nothing to their name, and were cared for by the local Lutheran Church for their first cold winter in North America, the land of milk and honey.
Later, their North Dakota homestead was thrown into chaos and poverty by the untimely death of my Great-Grandfather due to consumption, as they called it then – we know it today as tuberculosis. Starting out with no belongings forced him to work cutting timber and laying track for the early railroads.
This made a farmer out of the eldest son at fifteen, and a farm labourer out of my own Grandfather at 13. Two younger brothers and one sister grew up in this time of uncertainty and hardship, too young to bear a full burden.
What kind of blessing was this? Well, ultimately an entire collection of Saskatchewan homesteads, beautiful farms, were the result, as the brothers left behind the pain and hardship of North Dakota and came to Canada, to the beautiful lake country, which they called Vatnabyggd- the ‘Water Settlement’.
When the second eldest brother – my Grandfather - now a cowboy and ranch hard at 22 years of age - first rode up north in 1903 with his some of his cousins and several others, a dozen hardy riders in all, it was because they were driven by the hardship of pioneer life to continually seek something greater. That pioneering Spirit is the One Spirit that blesses us all, everyday. The pioneer brothers, one a blacksmith, one a horseman, and one an entrepreneur with a bent for music and fine literature, all lived that Spirit, that urge to be more to be better, and to move upward in all things.
They all felt that blessing.
The blessing comes in the people you meet along the way, in the closeness of a family that has supported one another, and in the final results of all that adventure. The blessing comes in the wind, the rain and the sunshine of the prairies. On this farm, it came in the strength of their families, hardy sons and daughters, whose grandchildren are now scattered across the Canadian and the American west.
The blessing comes down to us as the people we see around us, our families, our friends and neighbours. We ourselves are the blessing, and we are also the blessed. The life we have today is truly a rich one, by the standards of those hardy pioneers.
We are truly blessed because we are alive, and we are here, in this beautiful place, this land of plenty, prosperous and surrounded by family that we love and who love us. All that is truly a blessing. The word ‘Bless’ means ‘to make prosperous’– not just in money, but in good health and the love of friends and family, in riches of every description.
And so I call on that Great Spirit that urged our families to this land, the invisible hand that has led us and fed us, clothed us and taught us, to guide us ever onward. That Spirit lives in each one of us, and calls upon us even now to say “Thank you”, and to continue to bless our land, including all who occupy it, all who visit it, and all who care about it. We were guided here, wherever we reside, for a reason, and maybe that reason is nothing more that to count our blessings, and appreciate and care for what we truly have in our family, and in our community, and on this blessed Earth.
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