100 Years of life

My Grandma turns 100 years old next week - born on Sept. 24, 1907. Amazing, isn’t it?

I’m going home to PA next week to see her and to celebrate her with my family. She has continued to be spry and active in her old age. Only in the last year a walker has given aid to balance and the loss of sight in one eye has ended her years of countless hand-stitched quilts. Not bad for 99!

My Grandma began to write her life story after recovering from a heart attack in the 60’s. She stopped writing for several years “thinking I may hurt some folks feelings who had been kind to me,” but going on to say “I always tried to finish everything I started, if at all possible,” and so she finished her story in recent years.

She writes of the typhoid fever epidemic that took her grandfather, a grandfather who was a bugler in the Civil War and later taken prisoner in the south, a grandmother who practiced midwifery in the South Mountains of Pennsylvania. In detail she describes her life as it was growing up with a mother with severe rheumatoid arthritis and a father who died at a young age from an injury while working for the government building post offices.

In January of 1918 Grandma and her siblings were placed in an orphanage and so she dedicates her “book” to “all those who have been suddenly thrust out into the world without a home, to fend for themselves.”

I get to take my new little granddaughter, Evee, with me (Jamie, too) and we’ll get a picture of five generations that span 100 years. Pretty amazing!

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

Change. Minor Inconveniences . . .

Some changes are life altering, like a massive wave washing over us, leaving us gasping for air and wondering what happened. Or, change can be like a stone skipping across the surface of the water, making a few ripples, then returning to normal.

We probably experience ripple effects every day of our lives. Like when I’m in the middle of a recipe only to realize that I’m missing an ingredient; putting everything on hold while I run to the store is a minor inconvenience. Or like the morning we received the phone call informing us that our evening departure for the Lake Express ferry was canceled, but not to worry, they would provide us with ground travel. The five-hour shuttle bus got us home three hours later than planned. A bumpy ride, yacky people and a late night might have been annoying and a bother, but it didn’t mess up life forever.

I'm curious . . . what things in life cause the ripple effect for you?