Boomer speaking frankly to Millennials

A Boomer Speaking Frankly and Carefully to Millennials

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I grew up in a past century and am growing old very quickly in the present century.  Life passes through phases and we change with the phases.  God is described as unchanging – the great I Am!  We, although created in his image are not Deity but human and therefore we are becoming continually.  We are constantly changing, and this is something I want to impress upon those who are yet young, especially those of you who are young adults.

            I once read an essay of how human beings are born into life as if they are part of a three layer cake.  We are born into families with fathers and mothers and grandparents.  We are born as infants on the bottom of the three layer cake with everyone looking at us and saying “ooh and ah” over the little bitty new life.  We grow up gradually learning a few words and learning to hate such words as “no” until we are thankful that we were told “no” until we could understand “yes.”  I was the youngest child of two youngest parents.  My grandparents had passed before I came into the world.  There was a missing layer on my three layer cake.  I heard other kids talk about grandparents and thought from my perspective that was either interesting or strange.  I was born in 1955 and both of my grandfathers were born in 1872 and all my grandparents were born by 1880 and all died between 1927 and 1949.

            Twenty-five years ago my parents passed away; my mom in March and my dad in June.  Life changed dramatically with my father’s passing.  I suddenly looked at life and realized that all my parents and their siblings; the children of my grandparents were now all passed and although I was in my mid-thirties I was the youngest child of the oldest generation of those who had descended from my grand-parents.  It was a different perspective regarding life.  There is a sense with the passing of the generation older than you that it is now your turn to preserve the good of the past for the future generations that will continue to live beyond your time on this earth.  John Donne was much wiser than I.  When he heard the funeral bells tolling softly in London he learned not to ask for whom the bell tolled but to realize that every funeral bell softly tolling gives us each of us that message “You must die.”  For me that realization came home to me when my parents were gone.  From my mid-thirties at their passing to this day there has been in me that sense that I am dying and that the race I run now (slowly at my age) is one where I need to prepare to hand off the baton of life to a younger generation.  That was a change from how I looked at life when I was in my twenties.

            When I was in my twenties I was thinking about how I would go about living as an adult.  I was never sure if I would marry and have children, for it seemed to me that perhaps that joy was for others and not for me.  When I faced a decision about following Christ, I struggled with matters of lust and I seemed to be confronted in the question of whether or not I would follow Christ with the question of whether or not I would serve Christ if it meant a life of celibacy.  That was part of my struggle when I became a Christian whether from the Spirit of God or simply from my own weaknesses for I am sure that almost all of us are plagued in a fallen world by a case of madness and insanity inherent in our bones and mind.  So I have never had a spouse or children but I am sure that between the generations I am meant to help my generation hand off the baton of life to the next generation when they become the upper layer of the three layer cake into which we have been born.

            When I was in my twenties I wondered how I might live my life differently and better than some of those who went before.  I didn’t realize at the time that is how twenty-something year olds have thought since the time children and young people grew up into adults.  You who are in your twenties are taking the responsibility for your own lives, choosing your own principles by which you intend to live from this time forward.  Often you look at my generation and think how much you want to do it better than we did.  Don’t lose that desire.  You aren’t telling us old folks anything we don’t know when you determine that we screwed things up.  We did and you shall too, but most of what you do accomplish will be accomplished because you now determine to do things differently.

            We smile as older people because we chose our principles in our twenties that we imagined would change the world.  But over the years we learned that choosing good principles and living well by such principles were two very different things.  We learned that that the good we sought to do was often not as easy as we imagined it would be to accomplish when we set out to do the good.

            But sometimes there is a good accomplished because you choose to live differently than what the generation before you did.  I sat one day with my father as he was dying.  I believe it was the last time we were together.  His end was drawing close at hand and my life was in another state and although I hoped to visit him in another week or two, we both knew that in another week or two he might be gone.  He said to me as he was dying, “I hope I wasn’t too hard on you.”  I never thought he was.  I always felt like I had a father who loved me and in many ways he was the one enduring hero of my life.  There were stories about my father’s father that I had heard but I had never heard them from my father.  He had always insisted that one respect his parents and not once in my life did I hear anything from my father disrespectful of his parents.  Still there were stories of a man with a temper, of a daughter who ran away from home because of the pain she suffered from her father.  They were stories my father never spoke of.  But on his death bed after saying he hoped he wasn’t too hard on me, he added “I always promised myself I would not be like my father.”

            That is why when I hear millennials wanting to change the world, and not always understanding all the ways they want to change it I remember that I was loved by my father because he promised himself he would not be like his father.  So if sometimes you who are millennials have a culture clash with me and those of my generation I know this that the time is coming so quickly when we will hand off the baton to your generation and then you will hand off the baton to a next generation.  Each of us shall give an account for how we ran the race and handed off the baton.  If my generation imagines you naïve for hoping to change the world, we also hope you do change the world for the good by well-chosen principles.  I am at the age where someone my age that I work with said "It is no longer about us, it is about these who are younger."  So I hope even if I don't always understand your perspective that I will always be an encouragement to you as you prepare to live the lives by the direction you are now seeking to pursue in life.