Days Gone By

I’ve been working on a couple of projects with old pictures lately that have made me think about how much has changed in my lifetime.  At the risk of sounding old-fashioned – or worse yet, just plain OLD – I have to say that I don’t think everything that has changed can be classified as progress. 

I won’t go as far as to call my childhood “the good old days”, since there are good and bad things about every generation and every time in our world’s history.  It seems that we humans aren’t able to ever hit the perfect happy medium – the pendulum always swings too far in one direction or the other.  But, despite some of the negative things about the era I grew up in (like legalism, ignorance regarding racial and social issues, the pitfalls of the American Dream mentality, etc.) here are some of the things I miss from my childhood:

 

Life was definitely simpler.  Our pre-technology world helped us to have lower expectations than most people have today.  Those were the days of shared toys with siblings instead of everyone having their own.  They were the days of finding joy in the simple things – nature, books, bikes, and swings.

 

The world seemed safer then as well.  The 24-hour news cycle hadn’t yet begun, so we definitely weren’t as aware of everything going on in the world.  But parents didn’t have to worry about what might happen if their children were out of sight.  I went door-to-door and sold Girl Scout cookies – not something a 9-year-old girl could do today!

I know I was protected by my parents, but I think most kids in those days were more innocent than those being raised today.  The whole atmosphere of the world was more innocent.  There were things that grownups knew about that I never heard about as a child – things that were considered “adult” and not for innocent eyes and ears.  Sadly, that is much harder to accomplish while raising children in today’s world.

One of the reasons the world was different way back when is because more people shared the same worldview, which was largely based on Biblical values.  Even though everyone didn’t attend church or claim to be Christians, there was still a shared value system with a much narrower view of right and wrong than what we have today.  Parents were respected because they were adults, and they had the right to choose how to raise their children without being questioned by doctors, schools, and others.

I know that younger generations believe the world has improved because we now talk about things like tolerance and equality, and everyone can pretty much do or be whatever they want.  But the events of recent weeks should convince just about everybody that, like all previous generations, we still haven’t rid the world of everything that is evil or needs to change.  Only God can do that – and he has chosen to hold off on completing that task so that more people will have the opportunity to turn and follow him (2 Peter 3:9).  The good news is that there is always hope because God always keeps his promises (Psalm 145:13)!  No matter what things in the world look like, we can be thankful for that.