My deepest thanks to Southern Distinction Magazine for listing Give My
Love to the Chestnut Trees and me in “Stories of Georgia,” a review of Georgia novelists
in their just released current issue. I’m honored to be included.
A couple of years ago, I wrote here
about the summer our family spent zigzagging this country in a borrowed RV. The
series called Dream Summer is here. One
of our favorite memories from that time is of visiting the Ingalls family homestead
in South Dakota as well as the Mansfield home in Missouri where Laura Ingalls
Wilder wrote the Little House books.
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| The house in Mansfield, Missouri where Laura wrote the Little House books |
In doing research for another project recently, I came upon a quote
from her, which I know I’ve read but had forgotten. She wrote, “We had no
choice. Sadness was as dangerous as panthers and bears. The wilderness needs
your whole attention.”
We face many kinds of wildernesses.
And as we traverse them, we are likely to encounter a plethora of
predators.
Change is a wilderness for many. Letting go of the familiar to embrace the
unknown can leave us feeling as if we’re heading out over a vast prairie
without GPS, much as Laura and her family did. It’s scary. We grieve over what
we leave behind, and we tremble over what may lie ahead.
But the wilderness needs our whole attention, for in it lies our
future.
In the present upheavals are the building blocks of what is yet to be, and
if we allow ourselves to get stuck in our grief, we will miss them.
Laura knew the wilderness.
She’d lived in uncharted land as a child, and then as an adult, she and
her husband, Almanzo, faced distressing change, almost losing everything they had except their land to the stock
market crash of 1929--a new kind of wilderness. What would they do with Laura
in her sixties and Almanzo in his seventies? Through her writing, their daughter,
Rose Wilder Lane, became their sole support in a depressed market.
According to one source,
the Great Depression, along with the deaths of her mother and sister, may have
prompted Laura to put down her memories of growing up on the vast prairie. Laura
had established herself as a columnist for a local paper in the Ozarks some
years before, but hadn’t written the column in several years. She hoped once
more to make a little money through her writing.
In 1932, Harper and Brothers published, Little House in the Big Woods. Laura
was 65 years old. Many more books in the series followed, and as we often hear,
the rest is history.
Laura faced her new kind of wilderness with the same courage she’d had
when teaching alone in a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie far from home. She
simply used the gifts and talents she had. As she once wrote, “The real things
haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most
of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when
things go wrong.”
I heard the call to write long after many are already established in
their careers. Often, I’ve wondered why God waited to clarify this for me,
because here I am at a point, when some are closing their laptops and planning
European vacations, still hard at work. Still feeling I’m just beginning. Still
wondering about a breakthrough. Still praying as Beth Moore says to be smarter
than I am, fearing I’ve lost too many brain cells to too much anesthetic in too
many surgeries, which now take both hands to count.
I don’t have many answers, but I do have inspiration. Stories
like that of Laura Ingalls Wilder keep me hoping through rough times and years
of not understanding.
In my own personal wilderness, Laura’s story is one that helps me fight
the beast of discouragement, because her courage gives me courage.
One more quote from Laura, this one from The Long Winter, “Laura felt a
warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a
tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it
flicker because it would not give up.”
“Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who
blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on
with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no
parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished
this race we’re in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where
he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with
anything along the way: Cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in
the place of honor, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in
your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of
hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!”
(Hebrews 12:1-3 The Message).
