Sleepless night gave way to Easter blessing

We rolled into Kalispell the Friday night before Easter in 1991 with the weight of the world on our shoulders. An overcast sky spit sleet as we unloaded the van and piled into our room at the Glacier Gateway Motel.

My husband had been offered a job managing a small meat-processing plant outside Whitefish that at the time was a branch of Stampede Packing Co. Our sojourn from Sidney, where we had good jobs and a hobby farm nestled against the badlands, to Kalispell was to sort out the job offer and get to know this place called the Flathead Valley.

We'd been through Kalispell only once before, stopping briefly at Woodland Park for respite on our way to Idaho. My only recollection of the town was how attractive the downtown looked with all of its various storefront awnings.

Now we were faced with the decision of uprooting our comfortable lives and transporting them to the Flathead.

Our girls, ages 6 and 3 at the time, were worried the Easter Bunny wouldn't find them at the motel. That was their only worry in the world.

I couldn't say the same.

After my husband had accepted the job, I lay awake most of that Saturday night. I wasn't sure I wanted to move. Sidney was the place where we'd fallen in love. It was where our babies were born. It was home.

I tossed and turned and agonized at what the future might bring. I prayed, silently reciting Philippians 4:6, the Bible verse that had gotten me through tough times: "Have no anxiety about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God."

Morning eventually came. I retrieved from the van the Easter baskets I'd tucked away and set them outside our motel door. Our daughters marveled at the Easter Bunny's ability to find us.

As they played with wind-up toy chicks that sounded eerily real, I did some marveling of my own. Sometime in the night, as Easter morning was dawning, I found peace. Moving to the Flathead would be OK; things would work out.

That Easter was far from the norm for me - no sunrise church service, no big family dinner - but it stands as one of the most memorable because I felt God's presence that sleepless night.

OVER THE past few weeks I've been reading Christian author Lauraine Snelling's "Red River of the North" series that follows the lives of a family from Norway that homesteaded near Grand Forks, N.D. It's fiction, but her research into those early days on the prairie make the stories true to form about what really happened to homesteaders there in the late 1800s.

It's especially intriguing for me since my own ancestors emigrated from Norway and settled in Skree Township, Minn., on the fringe of the Red River Valley.

It's difficult for any of us to imagine what it was like living in a sod house while blizzards raged for days on end across the flat land. Their lives were incredibly difficult. Influenza wiped out entire families, severe frostbite forced amputations, food was oftentimes scarce.

These immigrants, and thousands like them, said goodbye to Norway, fully aware they'd likely never return to their homeland.

What got them through their despair and hard times was not just their quest to make a better life in America. It was their faith and their vow to "let the day's own trouble be sufficient for today."

My ancestors' journey to find a better life makes any challenge I've ever faced - like moving from Sidney to the Flathead - seem like a cakewalk. Sometimes it takes a sleepless night and a little talk with God to realize and count our blessings.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com