Only 60 More Years

At this point in my life, it must be said that I am much closer to finishing than I am to starting. That is a sobering point to reach. I can remember during my college years an occasion when several of my friends and I had decided to go to Ma’s Truck Stop late at night for some biscuits and gravy and hash browns. Every one seemed to be dithering around, wasting time, and I was ready to be there. I said, “Come on guys. I’ve only got 60 more years to live.” I meant to be facetious at the time, but now I’ve only got four of those years left. Hopefully, I was wrong. If you’re wondering, I was twenty at the time and 80 seemed so far off as not to be scary, almost not real.

When I think back to my pre-college days, it’s a jumbled hodgepodge of geography. I lived in ten different states. It seems that I first realized something about where I lived at about 4 years old in the Nebraska farm town of Albion. Art and Nora Rudman, salt of the earth Nebraska farmers, became lifetime friends of my parents during the time we lived in Albion. In 2022, on a trip to spread my parents ashes in Glacier National Park, my wife and I went through Albion in an attempt to find the Rudman farm. With the help of some friendly courthouse employees, and my memory that Plum Creek flowed through their farm, we located it on a county map and Debbie and I were able to find it amidst the rolling, corn-covered hills of eastern Nebraska.

There was no farm house, no barn, no sheds, no inroad, nothing. There were just rolling hills covered with corn. But I located Plum Creek and some gravel and the culvert from the inroad that I knew was about 150 feet from the creek. There in the grass, almost forgotten, by the side of the road we found a concrete marker. You see it pictured here in the body of the blog, and also above in the header image. It is inscribed “Site of Sod Home of David-Deborah Rudman. Built 1876. Children Nellie - Allie - Arther.” Arther is the “Art” of Art and Nora Rudman.

That corn field used to have a whole farmhouse settlement in it. It seemed like a long ways back from the road to the Rudman’s house to a 4 year old, but there was a big farmhouse, a smaller house for hired help (and I used to play with their children), a huge barn, a few smaller barns and sheds (and a pig pen that you may have read of elsewhere). It’s all gone now. Just a whopping big cornfield where people once raised their family and plowed with what would now be a small tractor. It meant a lot to me to find that marker. I’m so glad somebody took the time to make it and place it.

So many times I have thought about the changes my grandparents generation, people born in the late 1800’s, would have seen. I tried to impress it on the students in my physics classes. These people would have been born in a world in which travel was done on horseback, stagecoach and the infancy of railroads. Those who moved west to Nebraska from places like Pennslyvania basically left their families like Abram did in Genesis 12. Communication was more likely to be non-existent than regular, or even sporadic. Foods were kept cool by being stored in underground cellars, or they weren’t cool at all. Milk was a luxury and water was the most constant of drinks, There were no airplanes (Kitty Hawk happened in 1906.) Telegraph existed, as did the telephone, but few (even rich) people had them. Most crops were planted and harvested by hand. Entertainment was a couple of guitar players, maybe a banjo, sitting on the porch after dinner.

By the time this generation was passing on they had fought the First World War, survived the Great Depression and sent their children off to fight the Second World War. Travel in cars and buses was common, as were trains. Air travel had grown to a full fledged enterprise with airports all over the country and world. Toilets were indoors where running water was common. Houses, and cars, were air conditioned. Mail was taken for granted. Sears and Roebuck sold everything in their catalogue to isolated country places. People kept in touch by telephone, even with those in foreign countries. Space travel was more than an imaginary concept and for those that lived long enough, they would know a man had stepped on the moon. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Audie Murphy and many others had become famous as entertainers.

The world I grew up in was a different place. We had television, but it was a large box with a small screen and the only colors were black and white. I remember, as a five year old with a broken arm, watching “Howdy Doody,” with the peanut gallery and “Captain Kangaroo,” featuring Mr. Green Jeans. I don’t think we had AC until the 60’s, but that was when we first moved to Alabama and realized it might be needed. Food was kept refrigerated and frozen right in the house, no iceman.

There were no Pop Tarts or other such breakfast treats. We had Malt-O-Meal (“winners warm up with Malt-O-Meal”) almost every day, except for when we had oatmeal with brown sugar - because otherwise who can eat it? We always ate Sunday dinner at home and it was (almost) always roast, carrots, and potatos. It’s hard to believe how seldom we ever went out to eat.

We were a “road-tripping” family, logging thousands of miles across the Rocky Mountains from the Great Plains to California and back. I remember it being so hot at Hoover Dam (in a ‘56 Olds without AC) that I just wanted to cry, and traveling with the windows down didn’t help. There were no interstates, just two lane highways. We bought sandwich fixings in town and stopped at a roadside park, a pull-off with a picnic table and maybe a tree, to eat (no McD’s or Chic-Fil-A’s.) The motels were all one story. You can still see some retro examples here and there, but you never saw a Holiday Inn (the first modern brand I remember) or a Hampton or Hilton. I remember motel parking lots that had shingle strips spread in them for “paving.”

All cars were 4 or 2 door sedans, or coupes, and every man, and boy, and probably girl, immediately knew on sight what year and make a car was by it’s distinguishing characteristics. I’m guessing that never happens now. I know I couldn’t do it. Other than that, there were pickups, no SUV’s or crossovers. The engine compartment on most pickups at that time were large enough that a mechanic could get in it to work on the engine (well, almost.) Now, they are so tight with equipment that the engine has to be removed from the vehicle to work on it. Also, there was no such thing as an engine being controlled by a computer.

We had John Wayne and Clint Eastwood for movie heroes. Our musicians were The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan and a bunch of psychedelic druggies. I grew up with Mickey Mantle, Al Kaline, Sandy Koufax, Fran Tarkenton, Roger Staubach, Jerry West and then Larry Bird. (Yes, I’m going to get Larry Bird in here.) I remember when O.C. Lambert predicted that the next president of the United States would be John Kennedy, a Catholic, but most people thought a Catholic would never be elected president.

That’s the world I grew up in. Believe me, I could go on as I’m sure you could write much about your memories. But I’m going to be thoughtful and spare you from anymore of this sentimentality. Who knows what will be coming our way in the future? Well, not my way (although I’m hoping I’ve got more than four years left.) Our kids will be riding in cars that drive themselves. Maybe the age of the Jetsons will become reality. Maybe space travel will be a real thing. Maybe Bitcoin (I don’t even know what it is) will replace currency, or maybe all official dealings will be digital with no such thing as money. It pains me to try to imagine more. But whatever it is, that is the world my grandchildren will be living in.

I can only live my grandparent’s world through my imagination, even though I can actually read of it in recorded history. It would be a foreign world to me, but it was all of the reality that they had. It was very real to them. It was their time, not my time. They would not understand the world I have lived in. It would be so foreign to them. I am certain, I can already see, that I would not understand the world my grandchildren will be full fledged citizens of. That will be their world, not mine. I realize that they would not understand my world either.

What would it have been like to grow up in the church and the world of the first century? To experience a visit by Paul to your congregation (which he might have started)? To be so close to the time of the apostles and, in fact, of Jesus? What will it be like, if the world is still here, in the year 2525 (Zager and Evans were part of my world also), to be a member of the church, experiencing your congregation and worshipping God? What new capabilities will affect how the true church continues to do the same things that are done now, and were practiced in the first century as well?

This has just been a “stream of consciousness,” train of thought, maybe a train running along a track that doesn’t really go anywhere. I still would like to think that I can find a central unifying thought of some value in all of this. If so, I believe it is that man doesn’t present a constant front, whether through the ages, or even at any one point in time. The world itself is changing, with mankind as a whole having different experiences in every time period. (Funny that each time period thinks it is THE standard by which all others should be judged.)

But there is a constant by which all will be judged. That constant is not any part of any thing that man has ever done. That constant is God. I don’t know what the world will be like for my grandchildren, and I’m not sure how the church will function within the changing ages to come, but I know God will be the same, “yesterday, today and tomorrow.” Hebrews 13:8. He is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Rev. 22:13. Not only is God eternally the same, but His word will stand forever. “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” Isaiah 40:8. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Matthew 24:35.

You have been given an allotment of time here on this earth. In the end what will matter is not how your time period was similar to, nor how your individual experiences were different from, those with whom you shared your time on this earth. What will matter is how you used your time to worship, praise, honor, and glorify God. Did you do those things according to His will (Matt. 7:21-23), or did you live to please yourself?

The one constant that man needs to achieve is to surrender fully to, and faithfully follow, God. “Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” Ecc. 12:13-14. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” 2 Cor. 5:10. I pray that you will be wise in your choices in the next 60, or more, or less, years that you have left.