Life As It Is ... then and now

It was in the late 60's and into the early 70’s that I was not only sorting through the Vietnam War, the Kent State shootings, and later the Watergate crisis, but racism, the free-spirited hippie movement, flower power, miniskirts, end time predictions (my senior year was to be the end of the world), UFO’s (unidentified flying objects often thought to be aliens from another planet, I was sure I saw one), LSD (and other hallucinogenic drugs, which I did not experiment with), among other things. The familiar peace symbol became a sign of the times as protesters called out, “make love, not war.”

At the same time, the Jesus movement was in motion. In 1972 as a 16-year-old I joined 80,000 (85% HS and college age) in Dallas, TX where we sat in the Cotton Bowl stadium night after night encouraged by Billy Graham and Bill Bright to give our lives wholly to God and to be filled with the Spirit. Explo ’72, a Campus Crusade event, literally exploded with enthusiastic young believers that Graham hoped would be “a prelude to a mighty worldwide movement of God’s Spirit upon the hearts of men.”* The predominant symbol was the pointed finger of “one-way, Jesus.” Door-to-door across Dallas, the “Four Spiritual Laws” were shared and people actually responded to the fact that God had a wonderful plan for their lives (the idea behind this: just as there are physical laws that govern the universe, there are spiritual laws that govern our relationship with God). The week long explosion ended with 180,000 attending a 9-hour gospel rock festival where I drank Dr. Pepper and let the ice cubes melt on my legs under the blazing Texas sun as I listened to rock singers like Randy Matthews and Larry Norman sing lyrics like: “Wish we’d all been ready . . . there's no time to change your mind, the Son has come and you've been left behind.”

All these things made sense in my life.

I didn’t know that by the time I was 50 I would be encountering the beginning of what we call postmodernism. I probably didn’t realize I grew up in modernity! I just lived life the way I knew it to be according to where I was geographically located, my family upbringing, my faith, my church, my experiences; all affected by the culture in which I lived.

But something is different today . . . we’re in a cultural and philosophical shift that has not yet taken shape - something like Jesus entering the Jewish world filled with laws and traditions or Martin Luther issuing his 95 theses. It’s an interesting time to live. The beginning of a new era is usually a difficult one, but I’m willing to enter the fray and join efforts to discover the integration of two eras that I hope give new opportunities for the “good news” of Jesus Christ to be proclaimed and demonstrated to coming generations. It may not look like what I’ve known it to be and I’ll be asking a lot of questions along the way, but I’m sure God in His infinite wisdom has a handle on it all.

*Life Magazine, June 1972