BORN IN 1900 
to young newly married Danish immigrants who undertook their New World life by working a government land grant of potentially farmable acres near Yankton, South Dakota. These are the years in which my dad lived. And if you are reading this in America, these are the years in which your parents or grandparents also lived. Years that helped shape who they were and who we have become. Have you ever imagined …?

WHEN YOU ARE 14 
World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday with 22 million people killed. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until you are 20. Fifty million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.

WHEN YOU’RE 29
the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, global GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet. When you’re 41, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war and the Holocaust kills six million.

AT 52 
the Korean War starts and five million perish.

AT 64
the Vietnam War begins, and it doesn’t end for many years. Four million people die in that conflict. Approaching your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, could well have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening.

AS YOU TURN 75
the Vietnam War finally ends. Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that?

A KID IN 1985
didn’t think their 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was. Yet those grandparents (and now great grandparents) survived through everything listed above.

PERSPECTIVE
is an amazing art. Let’s try and keep things in perspective. Let’s be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this. In the history of the world, there has never been a storm that lasted. This too, shall pass.[1]

THINK ABOUT WHAT 
these special people in your life went through, your parents or grandparents who lived in or around 1900, when the average life expectancy was 47 years. I never knew either of my paternal grandparents. They and my maternal grandmother were already gone when I showed up. I only knew my mother’s father, born in 1877, who lived to the age of 103.

Think about what you and I are living through in our own time, then overlay these words of one they called Teacher: “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.[2] 

NOW IMAGINE YOU ARE YOUR CHILD OR GRANDCHILD
recalling when and where you were born, seeing from where you have come …

considering the years in which you, their parent or grandparent have lived. Can they ever imagine how important your years are to them, how your becoming a follower of Jesus during these years, has helped shape both yours and their lives?

 

I remember the days of old;
I meditate on all that you have done;
I ponder the work of your hands.

I stretch out my hands to you;
my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.
Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust.

Make me know the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.[3]

 

Have you (they) ever imagined …?

 

 

[1] When You Are 14 — A Kid in 1985, Author Unknown

[2] Matthew 6:25-33 ESV

[3] Psalm 143:5,8