This was published in the September 2003 edition of the ‘Wesley Chapel UMC Circuit Rider’, the monthly newsletter that I put together up there, editing, arranging, and writing every month for some years.

The ‘Half-a-Century’ was my age at THAT time… A little Math will give you my Current age!?!  🙂

 

Half-a-Century!!! As of this month, that’s how long I have lived! And that has definitely given me cause to pause for a bit and reflect on some of the changes that I have seen in my lifetime.

Consider vehicles… the first car I remember my family having was a ’56 Ford w/short vertical tailfins. The next was our ’60 Fairlane w/huge horizontal tailfins. My ’67 Fairlane was pretty much a square box, as were most Fords during that time until they went retro with the ‘40’s upside-down bathtub look with the Taurus. And mileage? My ’67 got 23 mpg, my ’72 Thunderbird (Big car, BIGGER engine) got 16, and my ’85 LTD got 12.

School? I learned to read with Dick and Jane, and by the fifth grade I was the second fastest reader in our grade at Hartford. Today? I have hired and worked with many high-school graduates who were unable to read the directions in a manual.

Technology? Grandpa had a manual adding machine on his desk as I was growing up that fascinated me. There were rows and rows of buttons to push (1-9, 10-90, 100-900, etc.) and a large handle on the side to pull after entering your number. Electronic calculators came on the general market in the early seventies and sold for around $100 or more. There was great debate and disagreement over some colleges allowing them into classrooms. When the price dropped in the mid-seventies, I bought my first one for around $50. Today you can pick them up for around $3, depending on what you want.

I have recorded audio on reel-to-reel tape recorders, eight track cartridges, cassettes, and CDs. I have ‘lusted’ after reel-to-reel video recorders listed in the Allied Electronics catalog (now Radio Shack), have some hundreds of Beta video tapes, many more hundreds of VHS, and am now working on a DVD library!

Computers? I have unbelievably more computing power in the small box sitting next to me as I write this, that I built from scratch, than the computer MIT had in the early seventies that filled an entire building!

I can most definitely tell you exactly where I was when I heard of JFK’s assassination, as well as where I was when I heard about the Federal building being bombed in Oklahoma City. I watched on the evening news about Woodstock and Kent State… wondered how anybody could be so Un-American as to protest the decisions of their government… then gradually came to realize that when the ‘revolution’ came, I would be on the side that most adults considered wrong!
During Edwardsville’s race riots, I escorted people through the hallways of my high school when the halls were so filled with blacks protesting their supposed injustices that one had to literally force a pathway through. (At my school, they WERE supposed injustices! None of the issues being protested were present at that location.) And I volunteered my time to help clean up those hallways and fire-hoses the day after it was set on fire as a result of those ‘riots’.

I have seen women’s hemlines rise to scandalous heights and then drop back to the ankle as the bodice was opened up to public view. I have seen movies and TV shows go from being family oriented and meaningful to being no more than formats for enticing people to ‘prostitute’ themselves to a national audience.
I have seen men walk on the moon and I have seen our astronauts die as a part of our space program. I have seen hundreds-of-thousands die from hunger all over the world while I’ve watched the corn yields in this country grow from 50 to over 200 bushels-per-acre.

I have seen scandals and heroes. I voted for Nixon, then later watched Gerald Ford… a man who was in no way voted into the position… be sworn in as President. I have felt the shame of watching us pull out of Vietnam and the elation of seeing the Berlin Wall come down. I saw women burning their bras and peace activists burning our flag.

In short, I have watched and/or been a part of what may well be one of the most active and awe-inspiring half-centuries in the history of humankind. In fact, I can only think of one thing that has not changed in the last fifty years… indeed, it has not changed in over two-thousand years… nor will it ever… God’s Word!!!

Yes, the world has changed. Yes, people have changed. And yes, people’s ideas about the world and their relationship to it have changed! But in our attempt to prove how much we have changed… how contemporary our thinking has become… we have tried to reinterpret the Word of God to suit ourselves. But it doesn’t work that way!!! God’s Word is Law! God’s Word is unchanging! And ALL of those who profess otherwise will someday learn the truth and then have an eternity of torment to appreciate it!

Christ’s love for us is unchanged! God’s message to us is unchanged! And the expected… and required… response from us is unchanged! Accept Jesus as the Son of God… and…

…accept His words as the Law that they are!