CHILDISH THINGS

"When I was a child, I talked as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things!" (I Corinthians 13-ll)

Within my lifetime I have watched while a growing number of adults, younger than myself, have never really grown up. They are still children! They have now become irresponsible and childlike in their dependence upon those who have chosen to be responsible and caring citizens. The irresponsible will outnumber the responsible before too long and in this fast pace of change they may have already done so.

Oh, how all of us reminisce the past when as a child the freedom of choice was so carefree and irresponsible. In my playground, life was much simpler and thanks to my wonderful and responsible parents, I was as free as a bird. I explored every square foot of ground from the Whinnlin Ridge to the Hooty Knob and from the Tomahawk Holler to the eastern slopes of the Pond Mountain.

In the springtime, I watched the last snowdrift melt alongside the purple violets as they made a chilly debut before an audience of late sleepers stretching their wings from their long winter naps. In the summertime, I dammed up the creek and built swimming holes to splash, play and swim. In the fall, I ate my fill of the wonderful bounty provided by the efforts of my parents and my older brother and sister. In the wintertime, I was a bundle of energy tobogganed beyond recognition. A blue streak, belly busting a homemade sled down hill to set a new speed record.

My wise and thoughtful parents began to weave into the complete freedom that I was enjoying, a sense of responsibility. The more I learned the more responsibility they placed upon me. I loved to hunt and the hunting I liked required a dog. A dog needs a certain amount of care and I learned that it was my duty to care for my hunting dog. Gradually, week by week, month by month and year by year I found out that freedom is a clear and concise choice between responsibility and irresponsibility. To exercise freedom to the fullest extent one must be a responsible person. Irresponsibility always leads to dependency and loss of freedom!

I am part of The Greatest Generation that Tom Brokow wrote about. We were everything that he described, but I have second thoughts about how some of us raised our children. Once we returned home, finished our education and started our own families we swore that life would be easier for our children. We simply gave them too much! We failed to weave the sense of individual responsibility into their character, work ethics and their faith, a colossal social failure and a sin of omission against our children’s rightful heritage.

A few years ago I was living in Jacksonville, Florida while the city was hell bent to obtain a national football team. The city finally hit pay dirt and was awarded a national team. In retrospect, the city went crazy; they had arrived. Greed and irresponsibility took over. They spent over $122,000,000.00 to renovate the old Gator Bowl and to satisfy the new owners a lot of the banks run by supposedly responsible people offered interest free loans to purchase seasonal tickets for the first five years. The average cost to attend each Jaguar game for a man and his wife is approximately $250.00. I personally worked with dozens of people with children who were only making $6.00 per hour that purchased these tickets with an interest free loan from the "responsible" banks of that city. I would imagine that there were literally thousands of such loans. The Jaguars put Jacksonville on the map but I often wonder what happened to the needy children in a city where the owners, the bankers and the patrons ceased to put away childish things and never really grew up!

I attend a small community church with approximately 100 members. We have a Bible study every Wednesday night and I am usually, with the exception of the pastor, the only male in attendance. Women, a lot of them single and all working parents, cry out in desperation for help as they seek male role models for their young children. I look around the whole church on Sunday formal worship service and cannot find one male under forty years old and ask myself, "Where have all our young fathers gone?" I visit with friends from other churches and they are asking the same question. You really want to know? They are at home drinking beer and getting ready to watch their "god" – football! They have never really grown up!

Hedonism, apathy and prosperity go together like ham, grits and eggs. HAP is a combination that seems to promote self-justification in all matters. It is a made to order recipe to justify a life style of irresponsibility. I have never met an irresponsible person that was truly a happy human being. I truly believe that the only true freedom that can be attained in this old world is by choosing between responsibility and irresponsibility. Once we put away childish things we become responsible grown up adults with duties that require that we ration our freedom of choice in a world that is crying desperately for faith, hope and love. Thus, true joy and happiness is reserved for the responsible people on this journey through this blinking eye of time!

The traditional culture of this once beautiful land of America is being dismantled right before our eyes. We seem to have forgotten the uniqueness of individual responsibility as we irresponsibly strive for an era of standardization; a sameness, devoid of God in a secular society in which the norm is an accumulation of mindless strangers seeking pleasure, prosperity and diversion.

Our cities and communities are all beginning to look alike as we travel throughout our land. Gone are the quaint little restaurants from the north, the south, the east and the west where you could leisurely dine and chat with the local people about every subject under the shining sun. They have been replaced with national chains of tasteless fast food eateries that seldom pays enough to retain any efficient help beyond a couple of weeks.

There are hundreds, no thousands of small towns that has no other purpose for existence except to serve as a parking lot for Wal-Mart or other national merchandisers that stay open twenty four hours selling only the fast turn around items. Millions of vacant buildings line our highway as a reminder of what these closed businesses once were to these communities.

We are stripping the beauty of our land and our people. We are turning them into strangers groping for instant pleasure and one of these days God is going to ask us "Is there not one righteous and responsible man amongst the whole lot!" What will we tell him?