The Good Ole Days

The older I get the more prone I become to thinking that things aren’t as good as they used to be.

I wish my kids didn’t have to grow up in a time when the most powerful companies in the world are scheming to constantly steal their attention. I feel like I spent at least half of my childhood being bored. Now, if my children experience a moment or two without some type of stimulation, it seems to be more than they can bear. And that’s the result of merely subscribing to streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+. I can’t imagine what they’d be like if we let them loose with unfettered access to phones or tablets.

I wish my wife didn’t have to carry the mental load that modern life seems to demand. There’s always a school email to read, another form to sign, another doctor’s appointment to get to, another calendar to coordinate. The constant barrage of tasks to complete, people to contact, and information to remember can be paralyzing. I’m convinced we weren’t created to be this busy.

I wish my work wasn’t constantly with me in the form of emails waiting to be answered in my pocket. There was a time when leaving the office meant leaving your work there with it. Now it follows us everywhere. Even on “days off,” there are hours that could be billed, emails that could be answered, and problems that could be fixed. Technology has made us efficient, but it’s also made it nearly impossible to be present. We can be physically at home while mentally at our desks.

I’m sure you could string together countless other examples of how we’re not in the good ole days anymore. Your own laundry list of why life used to be simpler and better.

But Scripture warns us against this kind of thinking.

Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions. - Ecclesiastes 7:10

While looking back isn’t bad in and of itself, it’s unwise to assume that everything about the past was “better.” Nostalgic thinking tends to remember the highlights and leave out the hardships. I fondly look back on the slower pace of life during my childhood, but I forget inconveniences that I wouldn’t voluntarily return to. Paper maps, anyone? No, thank you.

The truth is that looking back too often can keep us from faithfully living where God has placed us. Erica and I don’t get to parent children in the 1990s. We’re called to parent them today. I don’t get to practice law before smartphones and email. I have to be a lawyer in a world that expects constant availability. Yes, we’re faced with challenges the generations before us didn’t face. But they also bring new opportunities to trust God, exercise wisdom, and live differently than the culture around us.

We don’t have to pretend that modern life doesn’t have unique problems. It obviously does. But there’s no sense in wasting our time believing that following Jesus would have been easier if we’d simply been born a few decades earlier.

God has appointed this generation just as surely as he appointed every generation before it. And he’s put you smack dab in the middle of it. Our calling is to be grateful and faithful in the moment in time we’ve been placed.