Little House Life

I was thinking about Little House on the Prairie. It's the story you can describe as being all heartwarming and fuzzy and family and faith and whatnot. But their life was hard. When you talk about everything that happened, it can seem like nothing went right for them. Life is tough--and it will never stop being tough.

Sure, there are phases where you can say that things are going well and there are times when you just have to say that it's going rough. But there will always be obstacles and they will never stop confronting you. So you kind of just have to go along with that and accept that. This world is filled with things trying to attack and bring us down. So if you know that going in, then it can be somewhat easier to still create in your life that heartwarming, Little House tone even through it all.

I guess I'm just so used to thinking of that duality. Sometimes a little too much, even. Sometimes I'll find the dark moments too appealing because of their literary-ness and symbolic-ness. Sometimes things appear too striking to me, too poetic. But even then, I love that image of the darkness and the light. The light stamps out the dark. The light vanquishes the dark.

In Little House, when Pa is so broken down that he just shouts at the air, you'd think that would be the end. They can never get out of that moment. And yet they do and they still stick together as a strong and loving family and they make it in the end. They spent a whole winter starving, sharing one ever-smaller loaf of bread per day among six people in a space that was so cold that they literally woke up at least once to snow covering them in bed. Darkness . . . and light. Spring came eventually. It came late but it came. With it came warmth and the train and finally, supplies.

This world is dark . . . and that's why you reach your head and your hands out of this world into the light of eternity. Hope. Hope keeps us alive. The hope and the knowledge that all that is bad here will end and all that is good here is but a taste of what is to come.