Dear Friends,

Happy Thanksgiving! This is my favorite holiday. It is a family day and a good time for grateful reflection. This week I am still writing on some of the thoughts and experiences I gained from the recent 7,303 mile road trip Patricia and I took across the country.

Do you ever reflect on how you became who you are, where you are? Serious thought about this can be affirming and humbling at the same time. It deepens and broadens one’s understanding of the verse from “Amazing Grace”–
.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come,
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far;
and grace will lead me home.
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Patricia gave me a DNA test from Ancestry.com as a Christmas present. The results revealed that I am 31% Scandinavian — no surprise there with a name like “Hansen.” I was surprised to find out I’m 25% Irish. The Iberian Peninsula accounts for 4% of my origins. Many Europeans have Celtic blood in their Ancestry because the Celts swept out of the Iberian Peninsula through the British Isles into Europe and steadily east into Asia. Another 4% of me is Greco-Roman — the Roman Empire had a wide reach. The balance of 36% is credited to Northern Europe — this generally means German, the largest ancestry group in the U.S. according to the Census Bureau.

On a previous road trip, Patricia and I did some checking in upstate New York on her German-Irish ancestors. She has a substantial percentage of Choctaw Indian in her DNA as well. We marvel about the generational linkages of time and place that resulted in us meeting in college, falling in love and marrying.

It is easy to become absorbed in the challenges of our own existence and forget that every one of us represents miracles of faith and courage in transcontinental and transoceanic crossings, sacrificial living, hardships, love, and mercy. Viewed from the perspective of genealogy, our lives are amazing and precious gifts of a God who sees the end from the beginning and whose first thought of us was love (Phil 1:4).

I was born in California and I’ve lived here all my life except for the three years I attended law school in Oregon. It’s always been a point of pride to me that I am a fifth-generation Californian with a family that entered the land when it was still part of Mexico. I am a rarity in this regard. Most California residents arrived here after the Great Depression.

We leave the west and its ranch country behind us at the Missouri River. From there on, the country looks like a patchwork quilt of cornfields and woodlots dotted with barns, houses, and silos. The next day we cross Minnesota on a diagonal line from southwest to northeast on secondary highways for the most part.

The rolling prairies of Minnesota long since gave up their wild grass, buffalo and Native Americans to Scandinavian farmers who obviously like straight lines. Their farms are well-fenced. The farm houses and barns are laid out in neat squares and painted with care. A little on-line research tells me that these farms average 346 acres.

Our prejudices form from selfishness and ignorance. California agriculture is a matter of large corporate farming and massive water projects. Its hills and valleys with our two season Mediterranean climate tend to favor cattle ranching on thousand acre spreads which I have always somehow considered more desirable than the confines of the family farm. In fact, the average size of a farm or ranch in California is 347 acres, the same size as the average Minnesota farm.

My great-grandfather Hans Hansen and his brother Christian came to Minnesota in 1865. They were Danes from the Island of Als in the Baltic which was overrun and occupied by the Prussians in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War. The Prussian military police sought to take the teen-aged brothers into custody as part of asserting control over the hostile Danish population. The police came looking for them at a dance they were attending. The brothers fled and managed to get passage on a ship sailing for America.

Hans and Christian entered the United States at Boston. Even though the Civil War was raging, the teen-age immigrants were able to take trains west as far as the railroad was built which was  on the prairie east of Austin on the Chicago-St Paul-Milwaukee Road.

It was early winter when they arrived and railroad construction was shut down until spring. The young men needed jobs and the railroad superintendent took a liking to them. He hired them as night watchmen.

Hans and Chris worked until spring and then filed claims for 160 acre parcels under the new Homestead Act signed into law by President Lincoln. The claims were supposed to be awarded to U.S. citizens. The brothers did not become naturalized citizens until 1888. Somehow they managed to file their claims and established farms side-by-side near the little farming community of Lyle. They both married after a while and began to raise families.

Hans married a pretty red-headed Danish girl, Hansine Vilhelmina Nielsen, who was twelve years younger. They had six children including my Grandfather,Theodor Peter (“Ted”).

Although the reasons are unclear, Hans loaded up the family’s household goods in a box car put the family on the train and moved them out west to the Napa Valley of California in 1900.

Hans left his farm in the care of his brother Chris. Chris couldn’t believe Hans could be serious about the move and expected him to come back but he never did. Hans settled the family on a farm outside of the little town of St. Helena. That’s where my  Grandfather Ted met and married my Grandmother Jenny Grigsby, a grand-daughter of the Grigsby family who came west by wagon train in 1845.

I mentioned my bias towards the open ranges of ranches. The high plains of Wyoming appeal to me more than these well-ordered farms. Perhaps it is because I grew up in a beach town where the ocean stretched away flat and blue toward Hawaii or farms meant the full-sections of broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, table grapes, melons, and almond, lemon and orange groves that fill California’s valleys and the cattle ranches that have draped over the coastal mountains since the Spanish mission day.

But California has a long growing season, and little snow or frost. These Minnesota farmers face difficult challenges every winter that would make California farming seem like a garden club.

Land is always in demand. Farm families have children. Not all of the children can live on the farm with their families and they move on to new opportunities.

Sometimes, there is a yearning to see more, know more, experience more. Hans crossed the Atlantic with nothing and made it. Why not go all the way to the Pacific?

Patricia and I listen to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their surrogates as we drive. Both candidates claim to know “what the American people want.” They aren’t talking about the same people or the same things so they obviously can’t both be right.

Being American people, we think that what John Grigsby wanted in 1845 and Hans Hansen wanted in 1900 are the same things people want in 2016 — opportunity, choices, and a government that allows them those opportunities and choices instead of dictating them. Choice is essential to freedom and freedom to choose is an essential element of love.

And love, we conclude, is what drives the stories. The Lord commanded us to “Honor your father and your mother. Then you will have a long, full life in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Ex 20:12, NLT). We are interested in these stories because they are stories of family. We are here because men and women have chosen to love each other, live together and conceive and raise children to carry on after them.

They weren’t perfect. There were financial failures, crop failures, infidelities, suicides, dysfunction, alcohol abuse and tragic accidents represented on the family tree. Every generation has its issues, it seems. Life is hard, mean and dangerous. That’s why God graces us with love and faithfulness so that we don’t have to face life alone and can experience forgiveness and have hope.

With exceptions, my generation and the next possess a greater interest in God and the spiritual life than any that came before us. It is the human story that the earth and our efforts to live off of it will always have their limits. When those limits are reached, do we settle for the here and now, or do we turn our hearts and minds to the God who alone can satisfy the searching heart.

We are nearing Thanksgiving Day. Giving thanks is a tacit admission that we are not alone, that we have needs and a God who cares for us. Thanksgiving Day began with a proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 at the height of the Civil War urging the American people to thank the “Most High God” for his gracious gifts. As conceived by President Lincoln the day is a day for national healing and reconciliation through grateful reflection on God’s provision and mercy.

Our nation comes to this Thanksgiving Day the most divided we have been since the Civil War. Angry voices dominate the public discussion. “Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires” (James 1:20). Why not reflect with prayer and thanksgiving on the stories of those who came before us and their contributions to our being here? Why not remember our God to whom we owe everything and give him the praise and thanks he deserves? Why not remember his grace that has brought us through to this point?

Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt 12:34). It will be a true Thanksgiving day if our hearts are full of the stories of love, faith and courage that have brought us to the lives we are living and sharing.

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent