By my senior year of high school, I thought I'd figured out the course of my life. It was the middle of the hippie generation and Elvis had been relegated to the 'oldies' and the Beatles were experimenting with LSD. I assumed that my education had provided me everything I needed to know to succeed in life, and that the advice and admonitions of my parents and other adults were no longer relevant to my generation. After all, man had already walked on the moon; when my parents were my age they were still riding in horse and buggy. The big vinyl records my parents bought had been reduced to more mobile cassette tapes that could be play in cars or boom boxes. Technology had made obsolute the world my parents knew, and the rules that worked for them no longer mattered in the modern age of my youth.
Fast forward thirty-nine years: I'm 40 years older than my youngest child - just as my parents were in their 40s when I was born. The math I learned in high school is being taught in middle school today. I struggled to learn how to use a typewriter, and elementary school kids are typing on computers and wiring electronic devices for their parents. Where I was taught two years of a dead language, my daughter has learned four years of Spanish - a good thing since there's so many Hispanics in our country today.
My daughter can argue (not that she has, but she could) that the values and experiences I had growing up are no longer relevant to the world today. She can assert that her world provides nuclear energy, computers that calculate at light-speed, cell phones, the Internet which makes it possible to communicate with people on the other side of the world, missle defense systems, satellites that can bounce television signals or can zoom in and find a mountain goat standing on the side of the Himalayas. Where we only put a man on the moon, there's now a space station orbiting our planet. People today can text and twitter and blog and webinar, and never have to affix a stamp and wait on snail mail.
My parents wouldn't recognize the world I live in today. It has advanced so far in my own life time. But here's the thing: My generation didn't build the rocket that took the first man to the moon. We didn't invent the cassette player or electric guitars or any of the modern conveniences that I enjoyed.... It was my parent's generation that created those things! And the things that my daughter takes for granted today were built by my generation, not her own. Every generation has created so that the next generation can enjoy more from life than what they were given.
Who knows what great advances in technology lie ahead for my daughter's generation? What she will learn, given time and experience, is that the principles that guided man to the moon, to the space station, and ultimately to space colonization are relevant to every generation. It is vision, courage, compassion, love, faith, discipline - those intangible things that are inherent to human beings created in the image of our Creator, that makes us always relevant to all humanity. Certainly greed, hatred, pride, jealousy and lack of compassion are present in all generations, but even children know the difference between right and wrong. By choosing to limit ourselves and putting others first, we accomplish great things that improve the world. Conversely, by seeking power over, and ignoring the needs of others, we make the world a more terrible place.
When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments upon which mankind would live in relation to Him and to one another, one of those commandments was this: Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother, so that thy days shall be long upon this earth. God said that His wisdom is passed from one generation to another, and that man's longevity on this planet is assured only if we tap into that wisdom.
It is incumbent upon the next generation to determine what they will do for future generations. They can choose to go it alone, but they do so at their own peril. After all, I love my daughter and I want her life's experiences to be better than my own. I can live without ever traveling beyond the earth's ozone, but I leave her to reach for the stars. Like my parents, and the generations before, I pray for God's wisdom for myself and my children and for future generations.
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