or the loving smile of her older sister, Josie, and her feather-duster eyelashes?
I have email conversations with people from my hometown, almost every day. We are getting ready for the 45th high school class reunion. They loved hearing that a boy waved at me when I was with Sassy and said, "Hi old man!"
Many of them have serious health problems. My best friend from the neighborhood became a cardiologist and is now deaf, so he cannot really work at his chosen profession. I looked at my 6th grade class photo because Mom kept everything. Five of us have died from that group, 20% of the kids in the photo, and that is based on the people I know. We lose track over 50 years.
Most of us have done whatever we might hope to have accomplished, and many are retired. We often discuss grandchildren and display favorite photos. Granddaughters are going to the prom in sherbet colored dresses, and marriage photos are being posted.
I just talked to one of my mature students who was in my undergrad and grad student classes. He works for a university and we exchange ideas every so often.
He is 10 years younger and just left the rat race, a horrible work environment. I said, "In 10 more years your attitude will change about everything. You will not want a bigger place, but a smaller one. You will want to give away things instead of keeping them. You will be enjoying the little things in life."
If I took all the things that mattered to me in this life and put them in two bags, the largest one would be the memories of those little pieces of life: walking to the movies as newlyweds, because we had movie money or bus money, not both; getting our children to laugh about outrageous stories I made up on the spot; vacations in Chicago and New England; tutoring LI in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The little bag would contain the things that seemed important at the time and receded in significance.
Abused and neglected children grow up to be bigshots in the lower-archy of all denominations. I talked to a pastor from India, who was treated like dirt by his bishop. I thought, "This is an international problem."
We should be sad that these thieves, adulterers, and false teachers try to steal the important things in life from others, to satisfy their wounded egos, to assuage the memories of their tragic childhoods.
The Lutheran sects are quickly following the bad examples of their larger sisters in apostasy-land. The ELS, according to its own study, will be a footnote in history in only 20 years. WELS is no different. Missouri will take just a little longer.
The time will come when men will no longer ask whether they should go to one of the Concordias or the Sausage Factory or the Little Schoolhouse on the Prairie. The four schools will be tombstones instead of seminaries. People will go back to the earlier models, which produced such men as Gausewitz (ordained at 21) and Hoenecke (who mostly overcame his education at Halle).
You will not find zillions of hours spent at an over-priced Fuller franchise seminary for those men. They will be serious scholars of the Word, not salesmen for Groeschel and Stanley products.
Have you gone to Catalyst, Dirt, Granger, Trinity, Willow Creek, Exponential, or fill-in-the-blank? That conference will energize you, anoint you with the Holy Spirit, grow your church, and take your team to a whole new level. You will find energy you never had before. You will wake up every morning with a new mistress, saying "Halleluia!" looking forward to a new day of work. You will transform your life. God cannot do it without you.
That is seminary education today.
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California wrote:
Enjoyed your remarks re: "Little Pieces of Life". Moving along as an octogenarian, those little pieces of life keep floating to the surface of the memory bank. I think my generation may have come from physically hardier stock, for when attending the 50 high school reunion of the 1947 graduating class from a mid west school, about 53% actually attended from all corners of the world, and some still living didn't attend. I still keep in touch at least once a year with three or four of friends from high school, all alive and active into their 80's. I'm not so sure the urge to get rid of possessions happens to everyone, for my definition of what some call pack rats is that they may be "preservers of the culture". I have written a few monographs for my grandchildren, i.e.,"I Remember Christmas", "I Remember Easter", "I Remember the Day the School Burned "....to capture the essence of "little pieces of life" from my memory bank for my grandchildren. I am considering another one I will title: "I Remember Church".
