Beyond Common Sense

Dreams are strange things.  It’s amazing to think that some people allow them to guide their lives! But recently a dream made me stop and think about how much life has changed. I don’t believe any generation has seen as much change as those born between the late 1800s and early 1900s. My grandparents went from a childhood with no electricity, indoor plumbing, or automobiles, to watching a man land on the moon!  That’s pretty drastic! With the risk of sounding like an old geezer…

Do you remember…

• Waiting for Saturday morning to watch cartoons,
• When the Wonderful World of Disney seemed so impossibly far away,
• Cigarette commercials,
• When you ran to the refrigerator during commercials, (maybe you still do that! We only watch Netflix!),
• Dad popping popcorn on the stovetop,
• Mom heating up leftovers on the stovetop,
• Mom bringing in the clothes, stiff as a board because they froze instead of drying, then stringing a line in the house to dry them because she had no dryer,
• Mom sprinkling the clothes with water before she ironed them after she took them off the line to dry,
• Eating a MacDonald’s hamburger for the first time at this new thing called a “fast food restaurant,”
• Sitting at the A&W Drive-in with the tray hooked to the window,
• Sitting in the car at the Drive-in theater in your pajamas with the speaker hooked to the window,
• Waiting for a letter from a loved one far away,
• Sending your film off to Clark to get it developed (and throwing half of the photos away!)
• Waiting until the weekend or after nine o’clock to call because rates were cheaper,
• Trying to talk to your sweetheart in the kitchen while everyone else “lived” because it was the only place in the house with a phone,
• Party lines (for those of you who don’t: several different rings would come across your phone and if you happened to have someone on your line who wasn’t home a lot, you had to put up with their ring ringing incessantly, as well as the nosey neighbor who would pick up and listen to your conversation!)
• Rotary dialing,
• Telephone operators,
• Sears Christmas catalog,
• Chalkboards, the purple ink of a mimeograph machine, and eating your lunch in your classroom because there was no cafeteria, or gym, or auditorium. (I went to a very small elementary school where we walked to the kitchen to get our lunch and the first-grade room had a stage.)
• The merry-go-round on the school playground,
• Playing “King of the Mountain” on the huge pile of plowed snow at the end of the playground,
• Lunchboxes,
• Book bags,
• Typing a paper on a typewriter and using the little white sheets of correction paper,
• Looking up information in an encyclopedia,
• The ponies at Knobels. (Sorry, had to throw that one in even though it’s a local memory!).

I could go on and on. Times have changed—some for the better, some for the worse—but it’s good to stop and remember. It’s been a good exercise listing all the changes, walking down memory lane, perhaps a little bittersweet and certainly full of a myriad of emotions. Doing so can sharpen our outlook on the day and cut away some of what we think is so important but is as changing as the next model of cell phones! Carpe Deum—seize the day! We only have the promise of the moment. That thought will either drive you into a frenzy of “make-me-happy” activities or, hopefully, cause you to stop and consider the importance of making this day count for Jesus Christ. That translates differently for each of us, but may you find your task—the one Jesus has prepared for YOU to do—and do it! Simple. Well, maybe not, but definitely doable! One far, far greater ended his quest for understanding with this:

  Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. Ecclesiastes 12:13

That works!