And yes, the Homesteaders, including my grandparents who left behind almost nothing, and arrived in Montana with nothing but the clothes on their back, high hopes, faith in God and dreaming of the future.
Ultimately it's a leap of faith and a leap of imagination to put yourself back in time into those conditions and situations and see how you would react.
If you cast your bread upon the water and you have faith, you'll get back cash. If you don't have faith, you'll get soggy bread.
I don't accept as an article of faith that lots of short-term stimulus boosts the economy and gets us back on the long-term trajectory.
Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.
Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith.
It was all a back-handed blessing, and my friends were the ones who kept the faith, read my work, and urged me to submit it to publishers (by sending it out for me - they would not hear no for an answer.
It always helps to have a bit of prayer in your back pocket. At the end of the day, you have to have something, and for me, that is God, Jesus, my Catholic upbringing, my faith.
I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all our minds.
The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.
'Faith' and 'trust' are words that put the power in the hands of an outside force that we are meant to rely on - whether it is God or a person or the universe. Certainty puts the power back in our hands.
I can look at the future with anticipation. And it's comforting to know that someday, as Christians, we'll be able to look back and have a little more clarity on why certain things in life happened.
Think of it: television producers joining with newspapers to tell stories. It's journalism of the future. Advertising will follow the crowd - the 'crowd' being viewers and readers, of course, which could bring revenue back into journalism.
Obama prefers to look forward, not back, as he has stated. So at least during his tenure, there will be no reliable record compiled as a cautionary tale for lawmakers and presidents in future times of crisis. This is the historical Obama.
You will attract the younger generation and they might well prove tougher than the older generation. What we are trying to do is to look at the future and see what we can do to bring some stability back to people's lives.
Common sense as well as common values all lead us. Our future depends upon it and our present is going to be vastly better when we get back to these basics.
But before looking to the future, let's glance back at the road we've traveled these past two years because that is the source of much of the optimism we are all feeling about the future.
We cannot turn the clock back nor can we undo the harm caused, but we have the power to determine the future and to ensure that what happened never happens again.
What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.
It's funny, I listen to friends who talk about back when they were 14, eight, 16, whatever, as if it was yesterday. Me, I've no idea what I did. It's all a blur, I'm afraid.
I think back to some of the things Harry said and some of the things I said trying to be funny. If I said them now, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
