I was born just about dead center of the twentieth century. Behind me lay two world wars, ahead of me loomed the Korean and Vietnam wars. My grandparents’ familiarity with kerosene lamps, outdoor plumbing, four-legged transportation, and the advent of radio and silent movies would hold its own on the seesaw of life against that of my grandchildren’s acquaintance with modern technology and all of its wonders.
When I entered the world, doctors still made house calls and knew you by name. Around that same time parents everywhere heralded the end of polio, not realizing that an even greater medical menace, AIDS, loomed on the horizon. Modern medicine was pregnant with possibilities for prolonging both the quantity and quality of life. Hand in hand with these advances, the emergence of genetic engineering, cloning, and partial-birth abortions would soon force consideration of ethical issues that were unheard of at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the 1950s the advent of black-and-white TV changed households forever, perhaps even more than anyone dreamed they possibly could. Today even Christians watch rape, murder, adultery, and unlimited violence, and listen to language once considered unacceptable in mixed company (much less on TV) and call it entertainment.
While each succeeding generation’s world would be enlarged experientially to include video games, the internet, and mind-altering drugs, it would shrink emotionally as grandparents were shipped off to live out their last days as residents of a nursing home and parents dissolved their own homes with alarming regularly. A generation of latchkey kids emerged as the rate of divorce and the number of working mothers both skyrocketed. Children would learn to view being shuttled between divorced, or never-married, parents as “normal” while considering it unusual for any of their playmates to have biological parents married to each other and living under the same roof.
My grandparents communicated via the hand-cranked instrument that gave them an ear into the community. Communication today consists of hours before a computer screen at work or home or a cell phone plugged into the ear while out in the community.
My parents grappled with the relatively new concept of airline travel, unaware that placing the first man on the moon would occur before my mother’s fledgling flight halfway across the United States. My grandmother reaped the benefits of the fight for the right for women to vote. Financial insecurity, with its resulting depression, recession, or whatever newest term they choose to use, stands as formidable bookends on either side of my generation.
We must be willing to look into the past and learn from it, as well as to look into the future and dream with it.
The recognition of God as relevant to an individual’s life spiked during personal, national, or world crises both before and after my birth, but remained a debatable issue between catastrophic events. The theory of evolution became a household word as theologians and scientists alike wrestled with its implications.
In The Threshold
To stand in the threshold between past and present and know that you are standing there is one thing; to be born and placed on that same threshold without a clue as to its significance is quite another. To be willing to learn the true meaning of that position requires a willingness to step outside of where we are and look at both sides of that doorway. We must be willing to look into the past and learn from it, as well as to look into the future and dream with it.
My generation has an obligation to examine both worlds and hang on to the best parts while sifting through the things that would serve to distract from the foundational issues of life. Some things never change no matter what you do to the trappings. Such issues as morality and purpose are just as important at the beginning of the twenty-first century as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century.
I am who I am today because I have held hands with both the past and the future. I have witnessed for myself, and heard firsthand stories, of where we came from; and I have caught a glimpse—however limited or blurred—of where we are going. Those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s of the twentieth century hold a unique position in history. We owe it to those who went before us to transfer to those coming after us, as best we can, the sense of purpose, the ethics, and the set of values that were passed down to us by our forebears. Without that balance in the seesaw of life, the rapid and remarkable “advances” of the last half of the twentieth century could very well, during the present century, become not the fulfillment of our destiny but the beginning of our destruction. Ignoring the past because it is that—the past—could keep this generation from being ready for the most important future they will ever experience.
I was born just about dead center of the twentieth century. Between two worlds. I was reborn some 13years later. Again, I stand between two worlds—the temporal and the eternal. I pray that the lessons I have learned from being born between two worlds in the physical realm will help me to be prepared for dealing with the even more important tension between the two worlds in the spiritual arena. I pray I will not ignore the past—because it is past—but will use its lessons to prepare for the future that counts.
