Ranch Wife Musings | Life, Liberty, Happiness

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on July 15, 2026

I didn’t see a single firework this year. Is that crazy? Our country celebrates her 250^th birthday and I don’t see a single firework? But we are in a season of family life where naps and bedtime are pretty important, and bedtime is well before sunset. Hence, no fireworks. We did, however, enjoy some excellent smoked beef brisket and cheesecake and in our own way fully reveled in patriotic festivity. After all, it is good to live in a country so great that even the people who hate her refuse to leave.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Independence reads, “that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The pursuit of happiness. I wonder, can we even define happiness? Is it possible to define something that is so personal? What makes me happy might not make you happy. Yet, in spite of the difficulty in definition, happiness (and not just the pursuit of it) has become more or less the pinnacle right focused on in our oh-so-wise modern day, the key metric used to determine the rightness of something. Whether it is a single decision or an entire lifestyle choice, we look at it through the lens of our own self-gratification, our own comfort. Will it make me happy? If someone or something spoils my happiness, that someone or something is trampling all over my pinnacle right.

One’s definition of happiness is very much dependent on what one believes to be valuable at a core level. If you value ease, you will not value things that are hard. If you value convenience, you will not value things that are inconvenient. If you value maximizing your potential, you will not value things that stand in the way of upward progress. If you value pleasure, you will not value things that require self-denial. If you believe that that which is valuable doesn’t extend beyond the grave, you will live in a way that reflects that. If you believe that there is meaning and purpose in eternity, you will live in a way that reflects that.

On the one hand, we have those whose values propel them to get married and be faithful spouses, to have children, work hard, live within their means and be productive members of their communities. On the other hand, we have those whose values propel them to move through serial relationships without commitment, to avoid children at any and all costs, to follow any and all sexual proclivities, and to live wildly lavish lifestyles disconnected from the good of those around them. We have those whose values propel them to live generously with the long-term good of others in view, and those whose values propel them to live greedily with only their gain in view. All in the name of happiness. It shouldn’t be controversial to state that those value sets aren’t inherently equal, but alas, we live in confusing times.

If our cultural obsession with recreation, entertainment, and convenience is any indicator of the extent to which we pursue happiness, we should be seeing incredible degrees of resulting happiness. Yet loneliness is epidemic, drug use is rampant, marriages fall apart at record rates, many Americans suffer with anxiety and depression, and multiple millions plan or attempt suicide each year. Is our pursuit of happiness working?

It seems to me that perhaps our cultural definition of happiness is toxic. Because maybe, just maybe, that’s what happens when we cherry pick parts of our founding documents and leave out the inconvenient and politically incorrect parts. We don’t have the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness randomly and by chance, or without context. We have been given them by our Creator, and that Creator has laws which compel, constrain, inform and shape society and individual morality and virtue, a broad topic with which our Founders were very concerned.

They recognized that for a nation to truly enjoy life, liberty, and happiness, private virtue had to exist within individuals. John Adams famously wrote: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion….Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Try saying that in the public sphere today without getting tarred and feathered.

So many of the societal milestones of the last 20 to 50 years have been precisely the throwing off of the bondage of morality and religion. In some of the key moments in our history, the culture-changers really were seeing and reacting to real problems in our society that were, ironically, the result of the degradation of virtue. But rather than promote virtue, the solution was to try to remove all consequences. That’s rather backwards.

According to our cultural definition of happiness, I should be feeling very sorry for myself right now. I set aside an exciting career to be “just a wife,” and currently spend my days in a repetitive haze of changing diapers, sweeping floors, doing dishes, and folding laundry. Some days, all I have to show for my efforts is that the baby is still alive, and the house didn’t burn down. My needs and desires, whether it is eating or showering or sleeping or social in nature, come after the needs of a tiny person who is very needy and has very specific desires. My pursuits have taken a back seat, my comfort is challenged. My. My. My. And that is the problem with so much of our cultural perspective on happiness. I am the problem. You are the problem. We are unable to see beyond ourselves.

Happiness, true happiness, cannot be separated from the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” who gave us the capacity to experience happiness in the first place, and then by rights put boundaries in place by which we are to live and which are to shape our desires and pursuits. Rather than asking, “Will this make me happy?”, the question becomes, “Will this be for my eternal good and the glory of God? Will this make me more like Jesus?”

After long nights that are anything but restful, when I find myself wondering if I’ll ever sleep again, I open my eyes to sunlight streaming in the window and my baby’s big blue eyes and round, rosy cheeks, and she plants sloppy kisses all over my face. In a moment of heart-melting sweetness and heavenly clarity that makes me a better woman and a better human and a stronger Christian with a more deeply-felt purpose, I realize that this is life. This is liberty. This is happiness.

Remembering the Past

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Laura Lindblom under Photography, Writing

There was something strangely beautiful about the scattered white headstones lost in the sea of prairie grasses, the rolling hills like rolling waves on an ocean of windswept, time-tarnished gold. It was hauntingly sad, so isolated and wild and completely alone. The date, June 25, 1876, is almost lost in time, but its memory lingers on at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.Although our nation has enjoyed periods of relative peace and relative prosperity, that peace and prosperity has not been the usual state of things. A glance back through our history reveals many events most people would rather not talk about, and if one begins to dig even more is unearthed. Time obscures many more event, both the good and the bad, than most of us will ever know about. But we can’t forget, we can’t selectively remember, we can’t pretend that the tragedies didn’t happen, and we can’t erase them. The past is immensely important, not to treasure our hatred and nurse our resentment, but to foster compassion. We need to remember our past, with forgiveness, compassion, and humility.The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a tragedy. The events surrounding it and the way the U.S. Government treated the Indians and cheated them out of land that was rightfully theirs and guaranteed to them is an ugly, disgraceful blot on our history. The crimes and atrocities committed on both sides are shameful and inhuman, and those who have proper perspective realize that and can acknowledge that. If we try to judge the past by the standards of the present, we’ll only succeed in cultivating and perpetuating hatred. We have to look at the past through the lens of the past, not through a lens of modern-day political correctness or 130-year hindsight. And the Monument succeeds in doing that. I was struck by the level of cross-cultural unity and the way in which all of the fallen were honored, not only the Army or only the Cheyenne and those who fought with them. It is a tribute to the heroism of all the warriors, and a love song to the lives that were lost.
The men who died were warriors. It was their way of life to defend their way of life, whether we look back and judge their way of life as right or wrong. They fought bravely and according to their code of battle. The following quote inscribed on the Indian Memorial is striking:

“It was a terrible battle….a hard battle because both sides were brave warriors.” ~Red Feather, Lakota

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Waiting

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

IMG_5301.lowrez Christmas Eve is a good time to remember – and to reflect. On Christmas Day, Christians celebrate the miraculous birth of a Savior, God Incarnate, who humbled Himself to come to earth as a baby, as the frailest form of humanity. But I think we often make the mistake of forgetting that the Christmas story doesn’t start in the book of Matthew, but it starts back in the book of Genesis. Throughout the Old Testament, a Savior was waited for – The entire Old Testament leads us to Christ.

It starts back in Eden, when Adam and Even were still the first people on earth.

In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve rejected God’s command, God cursed the earth and increased the trials both men and women would face, but He also gave them hope – The hope of Someone who would come to earth to do battle with Satan.

In Genesis 13, God told Abraham that all families of earth would be blessed through Abraham. And in Genesis 15, God told Abraham, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your offspring be.”

IMG_5295.lowrez In Genesis 49, the last days of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, are recorded. Jacob was nearing the end of his life, and he gave a blessing to each of his sons. This wasn’t a blessing of earthly proportions, but was prophetic in nature and from the hand of God. In his blessing to Judah, he says, “Judah, your brothers shall praise you…The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.”

In the second book of Samuel, chapter 7, the prophet Nathan came to King David, who was himself a descent of Abraham and Jacob, and told him, “….the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom….And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.”

And in the book of Micah, the prophet speaks about Bethlehem: “From you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”

These five examples barely scratch the surface of the promises and foreshadowing of the Messiah in the Old Testament. These are just a few of the many promises and prophesies that God gave His people – These were signs by which they would recognize the Messiah. They were reminders that God hadn’t forgotten His promises. God had a plan, a perfect plan, a beautiful plan, by which He would bring Salvation into the world, by which all families of earth would be blessed, who would rule in righteousness and justice and mercy, who would establish His throne forever. The Israelites waited eagerly and probably wearily for the Messiah, a king who would come and free them from the various harsh oppressions they lived under. As is so often the case, our anticipation of God’s plan for our lives is so much less than what He actually has planned. They waited for an earthly king. God had a different plan.

Finally, as is recorded in the book of Matthew, a baby was born, given the name Jesus, born in the town of Bethlehem, to a young virgin named Mary, who was of the house of David (Luke 3), who conceived her Child miraculously through the Holy Spirit. This Child’s legal, adoptive father, Joseph, was also of the house and lineage of David (Matthew 1), making this Child both legally and physically of the house and lineage of David the King, and Judah, and Abraham. God always keeps His promises.

From Abraham’s lineage there did come whole nations of people on earth, but more importantly, from Abraham’s lineage was born the Messiah, through whom “all families of earth shall be blessed.”Abraham’s lineage is truly a magnificent lineage, and includes every single Child of God, every single person saved from their sins by faith in God’s Son and adopted into that glorious heritage. Even Abraham, who knew God with such a blessed kind of faith, couldn’t have comprehended that his legacy would include everyone adopted into God’s family through the saving work of the Messiah who would come from his lineage! What wonderful history!

IMG_5302.lowrez And it continues today! The scepter hasn’t left the house of Judah. The never-ending throne of King David is still being ruled from today, because Jesus, the Son of David, is reigning in Heaven, risen and glorious, and will one day return to finish His battle with Satan. The king the Israelites expected was a king who would wipe out their earthly enemies, restore earthly peace, and give earthly justice. But the King that God had planned would be a King who would wipe away our sins, our tears, our spiritual enemies, who would provide the Gift of Salvation, who would come to earth as a Man, someone we can try to comprehend with our finite minds, someone who can sympathize with us in our weakness, someone to demonstrate a life of righteousness, love, faith, purity, joy, servanthood, humility, and sacrifice. A King who would restore Spiritual Peace, and give Spiritual Justice and Mercy. A King who would adopt us into His household and call us His children, His brothers and sisters, His family.