One generation later
06/08/15 04:45
It just happens that we have two nephews who are 29 years old this year. We also have a niece whose husband is 29. That’s a bit younger than our children, but it is an age that I can clearly remember from my own life. Since we’ve visited two of the three on this trip, it gives me an opportunity to reflect on what things have changed and what things remain the same one generation later.
Like the two that we have visited on this trip, I was a new father when I was 29. Both of these young men have daughters that are amazing and wonderful. I need only spend a few minutes with them to be reminded of the incredible wonder that comes with the first year of the first child in a family. The time is intense. You probably are sleeping a bit less than you are used to doing. But the time is also incredibly meaningful. You want to keep your eyes open because so much change is happening in such a short amount of time. And all of that change that you are witnessing in your child gives you the opportunity to think about a few changes in your own life as well. It is time to become a bit more responsible; to settle down a little bit; to be reminded that your life is about more than just your own needs and desires.
All three of the 29 year-old nephews in our family are still exploring their careers. Two of the three are in school, working on degrees. The third has graduated from college and is working to support himself, but changes jobs frequently and hasn’t yet found work in his chosen field. I’m not certain, but I think that it may be harder to establish a career these days than was the case when I was their age. I finished graduate school at 25 very confident of finding a job in my field. In fact, we had the job and our new employer paid our moving expenses from our graduate apartment to our first parsonage upon graduation. That seems to be pretty rare these days. Seeking that first job seems to be the first full-time job for most young adults upon graduation.
I have served four congregations in three calls in my life. That works out to seven years serving the first two congregations, ten years at our second call and twenty years at our current call. Though we did make changes of congregations, our basic career and job remained the same. I first felt called to the ministry in my late teens or early twenties. I went through the schooling and internships to prepare and then I have remained in that vocation for my working career. It is highly unlikely that any of these three young men will have such an experience. They are likely to make major changes in career direction - changing their field of employment and the type of work they do - multiple times in their working life. Probably one or more of the three will have a job in their lifetime that doesn’t exist now. One is studying an area of computer data analysis that didn’t exist when I went to school.
Their world is already different from mine and it will continue to change dramatically. It isn’t completely clear where all of the changes will take place, but it is fun to think about those changes. For our parents, one of the areas of rapid change was transportation. They grew up at the dawn of the era of the automobile, when trains and steamships were the preferred mode of long-distance travel and saw great changes in airline transportation during their lives. The technology of transportation, with a few changes in computer guidance and navigation, is essentially the same today as was the case at my birth. People travel in jet airliners to go big distances. Some of the individual airliners in the fleet have been flying since I was the age of these young men.
Where our generation saw changes was the development of computers. I can remember the first hand-held calculator. I hadn’t used a cell phone when I was 29 years old. There was no computer in the car we were driving at that time. We had a manual typewriter at home and had just gotten an electric typewriter at our office. These days I spend hours each day sitting at the keyboard of a computer. I carry a smart phone in my pocket with more computing power than was used to launch the first trip to the moon. I was answering questions about our office computer system over the phone while I was driving yesterday.
Although there will be advances in computing in their lifetime, I think that these young men will always take computers for granted. They all use their cell phones as their only phones. They don’t have land lines. They don’t think of wires when they think of telephones at all. Their homes are filled with battery chargers for a wide array of devices.
I don’t know and I guess can’t imagine what will be the area of dramatic change in their lifetimes. Perhaps it won’t be in the arena of technology. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we humans were to make this generation the generation of real advances in the humanities. It is technically possible, in their generation, to end world hunger, to have all wars cease, to provide health care and education as basic human rights. Those seem like impossible changes right now. But we’ve already seen the impossible become reality.
The world is changing. Watching these young men is inspiring for me. I realize that our generation may have created more problems than we solved, but we are passing the mantle of leadership to a generation with incredible resiliency, imagination and energy. I feel fortunate that our time of life overlaps so that I can witness part of their time of leadership.
Now we head toward some time with our grandchildren. Imagine a world two generations on!
Like the two that we have visited on this trip, I was a new father when I was 29. Both of these young men have daughters that are amazing and wonderful. I need only spend a few minutes with them to be reminded of the incredible wonder that comes with the first year of the first child in a family. The time is intense. You probably are sleeping a bit less than you are used to doing. But the time is also incredibly meaningful. You want to keep your eyes open because so much change is happening in such a short amount of time. And all of that change that you are witnessing in your child gives you the opportunity to think about a few changes in your own life as well. It is time to become a bit more responsible; to settle down a little bit; to be reminded that your life is about more than just your own needs and desires.
All three of the 29 year-old nephews in our family are still exploring their careers. Two of the three are in school, working on degrees. The third has graduated from college and is working to support himself, but changes jobs frequently and hasn’t yet found work in his chosen field. I’m not certain, but I think that it may be harder to establish a career these days than was the case when I was their age. I finished graduate school at 25 very confident of finding a job in my field. In fact, we had the job and our new employer paid our moving expenses from our graduate apartment to our first parsonage upon graduation. That seems to be pretty rare these days. Seeking that first job seems to be the first full-time job for most young adults upon graduation.
I have served four congregations in three calls in my life. That works out to seven years serving the first two congregations, ten years at our second call and twenty years at our current call. Though we did make changes of congregations, our basic career and job remained the same. I first felt called to the ministry in my late teens or early twenties. I went through the schooling and internships to prepare and then I have remained in that vocation for my working career. It is highly unlikely that any of these three young men will have such an experience. They are likely to make major changes in career direction - changing their field of employment and the type of work they do - multiple times in their working life. Probably one or more of the three will have a job in their lifetime that doesn’t exist now. One is studying an area of computer data analysis that didn’t exist when I went to school.
Their world is already different from mine and it will continue to change dramatically. It isn’t completely clear where all of the changes will take place, but it is fun to think about those changes. For our parents, one of the areas of rapid change was transportation. They grew up at the dawn of the era of the automobile, when trains and steamships were the preferred mode of long-distance travel and saw great changes in airline transportation during their lives. The technology of transportation, with a few changes in computer guidance and navigation, is essentially the same today as was the case at my birth. People travel in jet airliners to go big distances. Some of the individual airliners in the fleet have been flying since I was the age of these young men.
Where our generation saw changes was the development of computers. I can remember the first hand-held calculator. I hadn’t used a cell phone when I was 29 years old. There was no computer in the car we were driving at that time. We had a manual typewriter at home and had just gotten an electric typewriter at our office. These days I spend hours each day sitting at the keyboard of a computer. I carry a smart phone in my pocket with more computing power than was used to launch the first trip to the moon. I was answering questions about our office computer system over the phone while I was driving yesterday.
Although there will be advances in computing in their lifetime, I think that these young men will always take computers for granted. They all use their cell phones as their only phones. They don’t have land lines. They don’t think of wires when they think of telephones at all. Their homes are filled with battery chargers for a wide array of devices.
I don’t know and I guess can’t imagine what will be the area of dramatic change in their lifetimes. Perhaps it won’t be in the arena of technology. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we humans were to make this generation the generation of real advances in the humanities. It is technically possible, in their generation, to end world hunger, to have all wars cease, to provide health care and education as basic human rights. Those seem like impossible changes right now. But we’ve already seen the impossible become reality.
The world is changing. Watching these young men is inspiring for me. I realize that our generation may have created more problems than we solved, but we are passing the mantle of leadership to a generation with incredible resiliency, imagination and energy. I feel fortunate that our time of life overlaps so that I can witness part of their time of leadership.
Now we head toward some time with our grandchildren. Imagine a world two generations on!