I had two thoughts during my weekend in Story City, Iowa. (Well, technically I had quite a few thoughts. I think pretty much all the time when I’m conscious. That’s just the kind of guy I am. But two of these thoughts were new.)

One has to do with family, and it probably won’t mean much to you, but I’ll share it anyway, because… because… because I have this forum in which to raise my barbaric yawp, I guess.

The history of Story City (at least the part that interests me) goes like this. In the 1840s, a few Norwegians began to take the gamble of traveling to this dangerous new country (where, their pastors at home liked to tell them, epidemics were rampant, wild Indians were likely to scalp them and slavers made a habit of kidnapping Norwegians to be sold in New Orleans. The part about the epidemics was true). The earliest successful settlements were centered around Lisbon, Illinois and Muskego, Wisconsin. Most of these immigrants came from what we call Western Norway (actually southwestern, but officially Norway has no south). It helped in dealing with all the strangeness and dangers to live among people from home, people whose dialects and customs you understood.

(Up until very recent times, Norwegian dialects varied greatly from region to region. Because of the way mountains and fjords cut the country up, most people rarely traveled far from home (unless they were fishermen or sailors), and rarely spoke to anyone who wasn’t a neighbor. Under those conditions, dialects evolved in very divergent ways. One of my great-grandfathers (not one of the Iowa ones I’m writing about here) was a cook on a whaling ship, and he said he often understood the Germans he sailed with better than some of the other Norwegians.

As time went on, the land began to fill up around the first settlements, so they sent people out to find promising new country. Then organized groups of settlers relocated to establish “satellite” communities. Story City and the surrounding area became a satellite of the Lisbon colony.

And that’s how my father’s parents’ families, the Walkers and the Swellands, came to live in Radcliffe and Story City. They came during the great immigration wave of the 1880s, decades after the area was first settled, but they all came by way of Illinois.

So it occurred to me, as I watched the people of Story County walk by, that these people were “my people” in a sense that the people in Kenyon, Minnesota (where I grew up) were not. Because even though Kenyon is a very Norwegian town, it was settled by Norwegians from different parts of Norway.

And when my great-grandparents decided to leave north-central Iowa for Kenyon, they were, in a sense, making a second emigration, leaving familiar things behind. You might say they were assimilating into the American mainstream by stages.

It’s not something I really identify with, because I’m one who clings desperately to tradition and what’s familiar. If I were them I probably wouldn’t have moved to Minnesota. I probably wouldn’t have moved to America at all.



The second thing that occurred to me was more generally applicable, I think.

I was stopped at one point by an elderly gentleman who was eager to tell me about an idea he’d figured out.

I wasn’t much impressed with his idea. But I made an effort to listen, and to speak politely to him, because I remembered (as I rarely do) something I learned imperfectly years ago—that all people, even those you think don’t have much to say, can be the vehicles by which Christ reveals Himself to you. (“Whatever you have done for the least of these, My brethren, you have done it unto Me.”)

And behold, it was so.

Because after I’d thanked him for what he’d said and walked on, a brand new thought occurred to me:

“If Christ is not embarrassed to reveal Himself through people who aren’t smart, or attractive, or polished or sophisticated, then maybe I don’t have to be ashamed when I act dumb, or feel ugly and graceless.”



I can hear you saying, “Well, duh.” But trust me. It’s a new idea for me.

I just hope I can hang onto it.