congratulations on surviving

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930’s 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s !

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open on the weekends, somehow we didn’t starve to death!

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy  Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because……

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.

We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY ,

no video/dvd  films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits from these accidents.

Only girls had pierced ears!

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time…

We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on MERIT

Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bully’s always ruled the playground at school.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.

They actually sided with the law!

Our parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like ‘Kiora’ and ‘Blade’ and ‘Ridge’ and ‘Vanilla’

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL !

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

i just took a long time to grow up

It is interesting to be going somewhere where you do not know what you will be doing.

I have decided to give up pastoring, so I really don’t know what will happen. I would like to get into writing full-time and I am going to try my best to do that, but that is an uncertain business.

I have about three books in my head that I want to write. It shouldn’t be that difficult. The average book is about 60,000 words and in the past year and a half I have written over 400,000 words just in my blog and in my Facebook devotionals. That is not counting other things I have written.

No idea right now where I will go to sell stuff, but I have to make the attempt.

But the idea of no longer pursuing the pastorate is odd. For almost forty years I have been a pastor. I feel, though, that God is through with me in that. I don’t know what he has for me now, maybe nothing, but I will no longer look to doing that.

It’s strange. Almost like a kid looking at the world and saying what shall I be when I grow up? I guess I just took a long time to grow up.

our day has passed

When we were young, we felt that we had life by the tail. When we got older, we realized that we had something by the tail and we were afraid to let go.

The problem is that we boomers seem to have, as one young man put it, a “cultural death grip” on society.

Listen to the music in the stores. It is ours. Listen to the music being used to sell stuff on TV and radio. It is also ours. Our groups drives advertising and just about everything else.

It is no wonder that younger people get irritated with us.

I asked my son one day what music did he thing he would be listening to when he was my age. His response: probably yours.

I am not sure what we have done to our kids, but there is no real culture at their age.

When we were young, we listened to a shared music, had probably the first nationally shared interests in the history of the world. A lot of that was because of television. We could see stuff and could want to become a part of it immediately.

And it was fun.

The Beatles came on Ed Sullivan and we were enthralled. Overnight, schools had to ban Beatle haircuts. We saw protests and heard music and watched a war that we were winning at one time be trashed by news anchors and bought into it all.

But as we got older, especially since there were so many of us, we began to like to remember.

The Toys R Us ad campaign that said, “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us Kid” was right down our alley. People in our age bracket on one hand liked to talk about how old they felt, but on the other hand, didn’t want to grow up. We wanted the age without any of the responsibility. We wanted to be perceived as being older and wiser but didn’t want to act older and wiser.

It was our generation that stopped kids calling adults Mr and Mrs, that stopped kids from acting respectfully towards adults. One way we did that, of course, was by acting like jerks in front of the kids. That is the best way to remove the feeling of respect.

We were young, we were strong, we were physically powerful – then we got older and we can’t seem to acknowledge that. It is weird how many women and men we see in the mall who are dressing just like they did 40 years ago (or how they wished they could have dressed). A generation trapped in perpetual adolescence.

We will get to the retirement homes and the Stones and Beatles will blare out of the speakers, we will sit around and talk about how great it was back in the day. It will be silly.

I suppose, though, no sillier than listening to the same music we have listened to for the past 50 years, playing over and over again on our radios. The singers are getting older and older, dying off one by one, until we just have to admit that the day is gone when we were young.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 says There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven. The Turtles sang that same thing back in the 60’s. of course, that song will come on again every couple of days on the oldies station, and will put a lie to itself.

Things have to pass. I guess part of the problem is that there is nothing better right now to pass on to. Our society is not particularly fun or good right now. There is no real music outside of Contemporary Christian music that is any good, so we look back, constantly wishing we were young again.

Our day has passed. Another day is waiting to dawn. I wonder what it will be.