I often say that the world in which I grew up was vastly different from the world in which young people grow up today. I’m pretty sure that the teens in our youth group don’t have a clue what I mean when I say that. How different could the world have been?

In a way the world was more dangerous. I first learned to drive in a 1958 jeep. I took my driver’s test in a 1963 Chevy. That doesn’t seem very dangerous unless you remember that the first model year in which seatbelt were required in American cars was 1968. There were cars with seat belts built before 1968, but most had seat belts only in the back seat and they only had lap belts. Actually, the car in which I took my drivers’ test had seat belts in all of the seats. My father was a stickler for safety and he was a pilot. We had aviation seat belts in the car, but they were lap belts only. I distinctly remember that the Highway Patrol officer who rode with me during the driving portion of my license test did not put on his seat belt and I didn’t mention it. Within 2 years of earning my driver’s license, I was driving 60 miles one-way to my trumpet lessons every week, in all kinds of weather across a fairly high mountain pass on a 2-lane highway. I would not have been comfortable with our children taking such risks in their teens.

We played in the river and after we had proven we knew how to get out of the water safely, we were allowed to play with minimal supervision. We rode our bikes along the edge of the highway. In the summers, before I had a driver’s license we though nothing of riding our bikes eight miles up the gravel road and back to town on the pavement. On occasion, we’d ride our bikes 16 miles to the the hot springs pool at McLeod and back.

I was delivering parts and lawn and garden equipment to customers by the age of 15. By 16, I was hauling loads up to 100 miles one-way. By 18, I was driving a big truck with a 36’ machinery trailer and hauling loads of around 24,000 pounds.

Of course at 18, I registered for the draft and with the US engage in the Vietnam War and a low number in the draft lottery, It was only luck that I belonged to the first age cohort from which the US did not draft any young men. I played taps at the funerals of soldiers who were seniors the year I was a freshman in high school.

In another way, the world was a lot safer. I knew kids who drank a little beer in high school. I even knew about a high school party where there was drinking and driving and the kids were injured in a car roll over. It was something we knew about, but not something that my gang did. We knew about marijuana, but it was never tried in the circles in which i ran.

The process of growing up occurred in a different order than it does for most youth today. I had two classmates in my high school class of about 50 who were married (and not to each other) before high school graduation. A dozen more married the summer they graduated. I was married at 20 and there wasn’t anything very strange about it at the time. The average age of first marriage has increased steadily over the span of my adult life. Only about 30% of young adults are married by 30 these days, although another 20% have had an extended live-together relationship. Living together before marriage definitely raised eyebrows when I was a young adult.

I have been thinking about the risks of young adults a lot in the past couple of weeks because I have been fairly closely associated with 3 different individuals who died between that ages of 20 and 25 in the past few weeks. Two suicides and a tragic car accident that claimed the life of another young man. That’s 4 deaths in that age group in a very short span of time.

I never attended the funeral of someone younger than I before I was 30 years old. That didn’t mean that teens and twenty-somethings didn’t die. We lost two high school classmates to car accidents and several to the war before I was 25. There are a lot of young adults today who have attended the funerals of multiple people in their age group before they have married.

I have no way to judge what is better or worse - the way it was or the way it is now. And it wouldn’t make any difference anyway, because the world has changed and we live in a world that is different from the one in which I grew up.

From my point of view, youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are extremely vulnerable. They are old enough to make life-altering decisions. They can enlist in military service, they can consume alcohol, they can amass credit-card debt, they engage in sexual activity, they have access to more money than previous generations. And there are huge possibilities for poor decisions to really mess up their lives. When I meet with and listen to the young adults in our church I am deeply aware of how risky their lives can be. And I don’t breathe a sigh of relief when they reach the age of 25, either. I seem to have a fair amount of 30-something adults that I know who don’t have established careers, who have been in and out of relationships without finding their life made, who engage in all kinds of risky behaviors with alcohol and drugs, who generally frighten me with how much growing up remains for them.

So I pray for the young adults. I worry about them. And I keep saying that the world in which I grew up was vastly different from the world in which young people grow up today.

It’s true.

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