Tag Archives: Jesus

Ranch Wife Musings | Life, Liberty, Happiness

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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 250th 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?”

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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.

Ranch Wife Musings | Bearing Burdens

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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on May 20, 2026

Branding season is that yearly reminder of how thankful I am for the community we are blessed to live in. A lot of prep work goes into a branding, from sorting, vaccinating, and moving all the pairs to the branding pasture ahead of time, to gathering up the irons and stoves and more vaccine, to rounding up a crew of our friends and neighbors, cooking for a small army, and more. We start early and work hard, running like clockwork to get several hundred pairs gathered, sorted, and the calves vaccinated, branded, and cut, swapping stories and laughs in passing. Shoulder-to-shoulder with our neighbors we accomplish a massive task.

This year, there was a different tone, a little heavier than usual, as dry as it is, as little grass as there is, and as many cow-calf pairs are already moving. If you see cattle pots on the road, they’re loaded, and sale barns are full. It is a tough spring, record-breaking in the worst of ways. Conversation returned, again and again – how could it not? – to the drought, the lack of rain, the storms missing us, the beaten down pastures, the price of hay, the price of trucking, what to sell and when. Again and again, there was the shrug and the weary smile, and the understood “we’ll figure it out, one way or another.”  

I don’t think it is a coincidence that as we have gotten more efficient as a society, we have also gotten lonelier. As we have replaced one another with machines, we’ve suffered for fellowship. As we’ve enabled ourselves to travel further for work and church and daily life, we’ve gotten less connected with the people in our immediate vicinity. We connect with hundreds of people superficially and fail to connect meaningfully with anyone. When you remove need, connection suffers. When connection is a luxury, it tends to fall to the wayside.

There are more efficient ways to do things. Some ranches have gone to utilizing a calf table to brand, instead of ropers and wrestlers, which cuts the needed manpower substantially. Ranches in this region are still largely rope-and-drag outfits, included ours, and for that I’m thankful. And a year like this brings that into focus.

It is years like this where we need each other more, not less. In some ways, that’s counterintuitive. We branded fewer calves, and there will likely be less work to do this summer and fall, and fewer cattle to work or preg test. But when you’re facing uncertainty, it really does help to face it with other people who are also facing similar uncertainty. Knowing that you’re not the only one really does help. Knowing that other people are just as stumped over what to do next alleviates some of the stress of having to figure it all out.

We truly do need each other.

The Bible is full of commands that my former pastor called the “one anothers.” In case it isn’t painfully obvious, the “one anothers” only work if you are with one another. They are hard to accomplish in solitude.

Love one another. Serve one another. Pray for one another. Be kind to one another. Forgive one another. Submit to one another. Encourage one another. Build one another up. Seek to do good to one another. Show hospitality to one another. Can any of those commands truly be obeyed without relationships, in solitude?

And one of my favorites: Bear one another’s burdens.

The mental image is that of taking a heavy load from someone else’s shoulders so they can have reprieve, or shouldering their load with them and then carrying it together. Shoulder to shoulder, both can stand a little straighter and walk longer and carry it further.

Bear one another’s burdens. Burdens of work. Burdens of uncertainty. Burdens of care. Burdens of sorrow. Burdens of worry. Burdens of fear.

Burdens like the task of branding hundreds of calves. Burdens like wondering when and how to continue ranching when the weather seems set against it. Burdens like if and when and what to sell. Burdens like how to feed the animals you keep, and whether to try to hold out for a weather change.

Bear one another’s burdens.

This whole season is one long opportunity for burden-bearing. Ranch after ranch brands their calves, starting in late April or early May, trusting in their friends and neighbors to help bear the burden of the branding itself, but this year there is more than usual of the other kinds of burdens, the burdens of uncertainty and worry and the rest. And I’m thankful for a community that can come together around a shared task, puzzle over a shared struggle, smile, shrug, and say, “We’ll figure it out, one way or another.”

Branding day this year brought that into focus.

Ranch Wife Musings | The Things that Never Change

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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle 12-3-2025

At possibly no other time of the year than now does the whole of society seem to move faster, more frantically, with hardly the time to stop and catch a breath. Shopping malls are a zoo, parking lots are packed, and the post office is drowning in an endless stream of packages shipping to people who don’t like shopping malls and packed parking lots. There is constant pressure to fill the schedule, to overspend, to one-up last year’s festivities with something new and exciting.

No sooner do we finish bowing our head in gratitude on Thanksgiving Day than a frenzy of consumerism takes over – not just material consumerism, but consumerism with regards to entertainment, food, anything that tickles our fickle fancies. We are pressured by advertisements and billboards and social media influencers and the comparison game to chase after those things that are novel and new, that next dopamine hit, the next picture to share on social media, the next experience to boast about.

None of which can infuse meaning into life, or a season, or a holiday. But we try, don’t we? And where does it get us?

Not that there is anything wrong with new experiences, and I enjoy Christmas shopping and wrapping gifts, and gifting to loved ones things that are special or needed. But in my experience, it is never the “new” that makes the season memorable. It is the same things, again and again, that make the season memorable and special. We are indeed creatures of habit, and something in us needs that sweet sameness.

The sound of a bell ringing and the red kettle at the door of the grocery store.

The same outing to cut a Christmas tree.

The same ornaments as last year, familiar and comforting, maybe a little worn and faded.

The same Christmas songs we’ve been singing for decades, generations, and longer.

The Advent candles, the same ones that we burned last year, and the year before, and the year before.

The same handful of traditional gatherings, whether it is caroling or that certain Christmas party, or a live Nativity, or a candlelight service.

The same hodge-podge, maybe even shabby, costumes in the children’s Christmas pageant.

The same foods as every year, traditions handed down generation to generation – pfeffernusse, pickled herring, oyster stew, turkey, gingerbread.

The same faces around the table.

The same enchanting stories, the same handful of favorite Christmas movies.

And of course, last but certainly not least, the same Story. The story of the greatest rescue ever launched, the greatest love story ever told, with those wonderful details that can become mundane and overlooked if we aren’t careful. The obedience of Mary. The faithfulness of Joseph. The humility of the birth of the Savior. The excitement of the Shepherds. The wonder of the Magi.

In a season of chasing new and different, it is the steady and same that keeps us grounded, connected to reality, and connected to truth.

This last month has been something of a time warp for me, with a fresh newborn and life already going faster than I want it to, in a slow mornings and baby snuggles kind of a way. This Christmas and Advent season will look a little different than it has in the past. It will be simpler. Quieter. Softer. Fewer bells and whistles. But the things that stay will be the things that truly matter, the things that point us Heavenward, and pull us closer together as a family, but also closer to our community and church.

It takes intention. It takes deliberate thought and action. But this time of year doesn’t have to be an overwhelming whirlwind.

So find those things that help you to slow down and savor the time, rather than simply surviving it. If you don’t have family traditions, make a few, carefully and with thought. Read a book for Advent. Let Christmas music play in the background throughout the day. Find a live Nativity to go to, or a Christmas Eve service. Bake cookies for your neighbors. Call your aunt and get that favorite recipe from your younger years. Read Luke’s account of the birth of Christ.

It isn’t the newness that makes Christmastime special. It is the sameness. The steadiness. The unchangingness of it all. Dig in to that sweet sameness.

We need those things that never change.

Ranch Wife Musings | Tangled Lives

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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on October 8, 2025

Recently I had the blessed opportunity to revel in the company of some two dozen other women, fellowshipping together in a sweet time of encouragement and camaraderie. As I looked around the room at all of their faces, old and young, all walks of life, I reflected on how we had met. How long ago. Our shared histories. How our lives had intertwined over the years. How God weaves individuals together into an amazing tapestry called community.

Community. History. Belonging. Friendship. Isolation. Loneliness. As seemingly connected as we have become as a society, with easy access to hundreds or thousands of acquaintances through a handheld device, with the ability to communicate instantly and share bits and pieces of our lives with the world, you’d think that loneliness would be a thing of the past. The past – you know, back when communication was slow and travel was slower. Yet today we are more disconnected than ever. At no other time in history have we been able to converse with people across the globe with the mere tapping of our fingers on a keyboard, and yet the cultural sense of a local community is anemic at best. Phrases like “epidemic of loneliness” are tossed around almost with nonchalance, and who is in the least surprised by high percentages of people, young and old, experiencing the pain of loneliness?

But how did we get here? And what are we doing now to perpetuate it?

We can look back 200 years and see the slow degradation of the family unit, in the name of efficiency and modernism and industrialism, that removed families from their farms, fathers from their homes, and children from the care and instruction of their parents.

We can’t change what happened 200 years ago or 50 years ago, but we can recognize unhealthy patterns that are being perpetuated through choices made today.

Choices such as relegating to second or tenth place the things that used to give life meaning, like faith and family and marriage and civic responsibility, in favor of financial stability and a coveted career. Those second or tenth place things are seen now as the icing on the cake, nice but wholly optional. Professional development takes precedence over personal relationships any day of the week.

Choices such as separating life from work. We no longer live where we work or work where we live, to give a nod to author Wendell Berry. We have separated work and life, and give most of our best energy to our work, leaving little for life, and wonder why our relationships struggle. Few people live in one place long term, let alone for life, oftentimes choosing career paths that move them hundreds or thousands of miles, then struggling to engage and put down roots.

We have chosen for church to only inconvenience us on Sunday mornings, if that, preferably demanding no more than 45-60 minutes of our time, and we’ve slowly chiseled away at the many ways that church life and daily life would intersect and interact, allowing recreation, sports, and misapplied “rest” to rise in importance and priority.

Granted, there are nuances to this broad topic that simply couldn’t be fully explored in a book, let alone in a newspaper column, but I see patterns of choices that our society encourages people to make, and the breakdown of community ceases to be a mystery. It is a series of little choices that led to and perpetuates the breakdown, and I honestly believe that a series of little choices could help us to reclaim much of what has been lost.

Choices, like intentionally instilling in our children the importance of marriage and family. Instilling in them and cultivating in ourselves the importance of faith and civic responsibility. Committing ourselves to our local churches, more than just on Sunday mornings. Choosing to be a neighbor to our neighbors. Choosing to sacrifice financially for the sake of relationships and long-term effects on family and community. Choosing a simpler life. A less lavish life. A life that allows for greater flexibility and time outside the office.

I have experienced loneliness over the years. Deep loneliness, feelings of isolation and depression. And I can look back and see how my choices were perpetuating those things, how my career and life choices were hindering, not helping, my ability to form meaningful relationships and connections. And then I look at where God has brought me, at where I am now.

As I looked around the room at all of those dear ladies’ faces, representing several different occupations and vocations of wildly different sorts, two different church congregations, and other delightful chance encounters over the last 10 years, I was blown away. Blown away at how God brings people together, allowing them to bless one another, allowing relationships to form and strengthen. Blown away at the happenstance crossings of paths that have led to years-long friendships, the role models of childhood who have become dear friends in adulthood, women who cared about me and took me under their motherly wings.

And it made me so very thankful for the tangling of lives that creates a strong and vibrant community.

Sweet Fullness

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When Brad and I got married, I knew I needed to do some soul-searching when it came to having children. I had been single a long time, and I honestly think it was God’s kindness to me that He sort of lifted the desire for children away from my heart for those 10-plus years of being a single woman. I remember as a highschooler and college-aged young woman dreaming of having 10 kids, picking names out, and truly having an active desire to be a mother. But as the single years wore on, it was a struggle enough to grow in contentment and confidence that God would provide a husband if and when He chose to do so; I believe it was God’s kindness that temporarily and gently suspended the desire for children and kept it from being another stumbling block.

So when I found myself married to a good man, I knew I wanted to be the mother to his children, but I also had this strange sense of neutrality. Some of it is temperament – I’ve never been the baby-chasing sort. As sweet as new babies are, I never feel compelled to hold and cuddle other people’s babies, and am perfectly content to admire from a distance. But now that I was married? I knew this was something I needed to wrestle with. It wasn’t that I didn’t desire children, in an active sense, but rather that passively there was no active longing. Does that make sense? I wasn’t opposed to children, but I wasn’t actively experiencing a desire for them either. It was as if my years of singleness had sort of muffled the sense of that desire. And as I pondered that, I realized how empty that was.

Too often, I see women on social media or elsewhere, professing to be Believers and proclaiming confidently that they have absolutely no desire for children and that should be fine. Granted, I don’t know their situations, but a common thread in the Bible is God’s love of the family, and His desire for His people to raise families to His glory, beginning in the Garden of Eden, with the command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Procreation is obviously part of that. And my personal conviction is that if God says something is good, we should think so, too. If God commands something to His people, we should take that seriously. We are not victims of our desires.

So I began to pray and ask that God would give me right desires, desires that pleased Him, and that if it was His will that we have children that He would open my heart to children, and remove the fears that gnawed at the margins of my heart.

And it is wonderful how God answers prayers. Before too long, I found I was no longer praying that God would give me a desire for children (because He had answered that prayer and had given me the desires I had prayed for!) but I was praying that He would make me fruitful, and would give me contentment and peace if He didn’t open my womb. Because I also knew that, although I am responsible to cultivate right desires, God doesn’t always satisfy those desires the way we want or expect, and He owes me nothing.

Well, it took my breath away when I saw the two red lines, and took my breath away again when I heard the heartbeat for the first time and saw the baby on ultrasound at 19 weeks. I’ve been living in a state of constant flux between incredible reality and surreality. Nothing had prepared me for how sweet it would be to feel the first quickenings, or how comforting it is to feel the baby move at all hours of the day or night. Nothing had prepared me for the sweet fullness of expectant motherhood. Fears have slipped further and further away.

And I can’t wait to meet our baby girl in November.

P.S. I took these photos for us with a tripod and shutter timer while we were camping in the Bighorns this weekend. Brad was great, and even consented to push the shutter button for me a few times. 🙂

Ranch Wife Musings | On Whose Shoulders We Stand

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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on June 18, 2025

Have you ever noticed the following contrast?

When Mother’s Day comes around, in sweeps the sappy sentimentality from all quarters, religious and secular alike. Church sermons laud the important role mothers play, encouraging mothers to embrace their God-given status and find joy in the motherhood journey. Ushers hand out $5 gift cards for ice cream or flowers to all the mothers. Mothers are showered with admiration and gifts, treated to lunch, and generally doted upon. All the wrongs mothers can commit are overlooked, and motherhood is suddenly elevated to frank heroism by a culture that at all other times actively discourages women from having children and decries motherhood as being demeaning and bowing to the patriarchy (but can’t even define “mother” anyway), while memes circulate social media saying that Mother’s Day isn’t just for mothers, but for anyone who wants to be considered a mother – cat moms, dog moms, anyone. I find it all very confusing.

Father’s Day rolls around, though, and it is a different dynamic altogether. Church services might give a tiny nod to the day itself, might offer a brief prayer of thanks for all the fathers in our lives, but any sermon that takes place is generally not a celebration of God’s gift of fathers but a warning to fathers that they had better shape up, and here’s how to do it. Fathers aren’t lavished with gifts, and social media takes no break from the campaign against toxic masculinity (which really is usually just a campaign against masculinity, period). Fathers are often the butt of sarcastic jokes, and many run-of-the-mill issues full-grown adults wrestle with are tacitly or explicitly blamed on fathers and mistakes that were made during childhood. 

The dichotomy is striking, if nothing else.

It seems to be a daily thing on the news, hearing about violent crimes, abuses, tyrannies, behind each of which is a man being dragged through the mud, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not. But for every single one of those events that dominate the news cycle, I would guess there are 10,000 men, invisible to all but their families, standing in the gap for their wives and children, for their communities, and for their faith. Men who rightly set the standard for manhood, for virtue and morality, for right and wrong, willing to hold the line against those who threaten the spiritual and physical wellbeing of those they love.

And we need that. We need those men. Desperately.

In a society where many social ills truly can be traced to fatherlessness and abuse by fathers, what we need is more strong, masculine figures, not fewer. More men who take the privilege of their strength seriously. And those men who are exemplary in their roles as husbands and fathers should never be in doubt about their value or importance.

We are who we are because of our fathers. Good fathers give us an example to follow. Poor fathers give a warning about what to avoid. But our fathers make us, and that trickles down through the generations, for better or for worse. Men learn how to treat their wives by watching how their fathers treat their mothers, for better or for worse. Women learn how they should be treated by watching how their fathers treat their mothers, for better or for worse. The importance of fatherhood – for better or for worse – absolutely cannot be overstated.

My dad set the standard of manhood for me. He was a steady, dependable, wise, Godly force in my life through all of my growing up years (and still is), and so much of the woman I became is a direct result of the example set by my own father. His living out of his masculinity gave so much context for my living out of my femininity. So much of what characterizes my faith and my thoughts and my loves and interests are because of my dad. How I view life, how I process information, decisions I’ve made – because of my dad. As an adult, he became the standard for what I ought to pray and look for in a husband, and his example of a loving and kind father and husband set the bar when I was dating. He demonstrated devotion to God, faithfulness to wife, love of children, gentle but firm in his expectations and corrections of us, and always pointing us back to Christ. He, with all of his imperfections and flaws notwithstanding, was my standard of masculinity and manhood.

Then there is my father-in-law, who has been a constant presence in my life for the last 7 years, as the first person on the volunteer fire department to take me under his wing and show me the ropes, and, more importantly, as the man who helped make my husband the man that he is. And I’m so thankful for that. I’m thankful for the honesty and integrity that my father-in-law has modeled to his son, for the instinct to generosity, the work ethic and ingenuity (it is amazing what can be done with wire and willpower), the commitment to family and community, the importance of being a capable and compassionate leader, and that there are more important things in life than the money in one’s bank account. I’m even thankful for the somewhat twisted sense of humor that I now have to suffer with on a daily basis.

And it isn’t too long before I get to watch husband step into his own role as father. Who we are because of our fathers will shape and mold the next generation.

We stand on the shoulders of the men who made us.