Jun 06 2006
Community: Generations
This is from the archives, 4/25/05, reposted here today.
Yesterday afternoon my family and I went to see my great-aunt Esther. Aunt Esther is the widow of one of an older brother to my mom’s mother. She’s in her 90’s, and was extremely lucid for her age.
As we visited, she told story after story from her younger daysâ€â€stories about her parents, her in-laws and her children. Listening to her stories was very exciting for me not because they were old, but because I am connected through my family to her life. My oldest daughter sat at the feet of aunt Esther and ate up the stories, listening to her talk about her life.
It caused me to think quite a bit about something that we’ve lost in recent yearsâ€â€we’ve lost touch with our generations.
In America very few people live where they grew up. Even fewer people live within easy driving distance of all of their siblings and their parents. We have become a very transient society and have little real touch with those who have gone before us.
Six years ago my wife, my three oldest children and I moved from South Carolina to Illinois to take the job I have. I love my job and am very thankful for it, but one of the few drawbacks to my job is that it is in Illinois and will remain in Illinois. None of my siblings nor my parents live in the same time zone as I do, let alone the same town. The same is true for my wifeâ€â€save my wife’s sister who lives with us.
I am not sure that this is universal, but this factor of our society doesn’t seem to bother most of the people I know. It didn’t use to bother me. As recently as 10 years ago I can remember thinking that it was a sign of weakness that some people lived so close to their parents. Maybe there is something in my educational past or some unwritten “ruleâ€? of our society. If a job asks you to moveâ€â€you move. If there is a better paying job in another state, we move. It doesn’t matter what our goals wereâ€â€we follow the job where we have the best advantages, the most money, etc. This ties in with what I wrote earlier week regarding corporations. Which demands more loyalty from usâ€â€our community (including our family) or our vocation?
When I moved to Illinois, though, I found people with roots. It seemed strange to me at first to meet someone who was living in a home that had been in his family for four generations. It doesn’t seem strange to me anymoreâ€â€it is sad that it is not more common.
My children see their grandparents once a year on the average, sometimes twice. The time they get with their grandparents is rushed, filled with seeing wherever we are, rarely punctuated by long chats on the front porch hearing about the childhood of their grandparents while sipping lemonade or iced tea.
I am more and more convinced that we have lost a great deal in not having our grandparents around us more often. I personally know very little of the younger lives of my parents and grandparents and that saddens me. I want to be able to pass down a heritage to my children and my grandchildren from my parents and grandparents.
I know that I have contributed to the lack of stories that I have because I did not, when I was younger, seek out a depth of relationship with the prior generations. So much of this is due to my sinâ€â€and some due to my ignorance as to the value of what has gone before. I know that some of this is due to our societal push for everything new, everything different. The wheel must be reinventedâ€â€it must be done again by our generation. What our parents did, is by default to be avoided at all costs.
There are times for putting off the patterns of the previous generation. I did not grow up with the respect for God’s Sabbath that I have now, for example. But shaking off the generation before us has marked us as a society without history. We don’t want to know what has gone before and so we don’t. And so we don’t know what was good and what was badâ€â€only that we must be different.
My wife and I have decided that we don’t want to move again. Not to a new area at least. And should God be pleased to let us stay in Central Illinois we hope to encourage our children to put down roots there with us. To pass up on a “better� job that requires them to move away from their heritage. My children may be called to be foreign missionaries and if so we will miss them. Even so I hope that they will take with them a sense of community that includes a touch with the generations before.
The fifth commandment is the first one with a promise. Honoring our parents (and our grandparents!) involves embracing and knowing our heritage and showing no disdain for those who have gone before us because they are old or tired or whatever. May the generation which we are now raising honor us and our parents in this way!
As we grow older I think it is human nature to begin to think about the lack of family ties. My children are still young but I have trouble even thinking about the day when they will move away. My inlaws are all in Cyprus, this summer the wife and children have gone to visit for the summer. My two youngest ages 4 and 5 have never meet that side of the family. Before I had children I never saw it as a big deal, now I understand how awfull it must be to have grandkids you have never meet, grandkids who you cannot even speak to because of the language gap, or a daughter you have not seen in four years. We have all been tought that as we become adults we are to set out on our own and make our own lives. I wonder what such thinking has cost us both now and in the future.
I, too, wonder, Michael.
This is why our desire is to put down roots right here in Peoria and to encourage our children to invest their lives here too.
As I contemplate what the future might look like here in Peoria for my family it is my prayer that my neighborhood grows more and more into a community that has a shared vision of some sort for the next generation. That means investing in the University East neighborhood, and not just so my property value stays where it is or goes up.
It means looking at my neighbors as a part of my community and thinking about how we can invest in one another’s lives. My prayer is that it becomes more the norm to have multiple generations of a family in one area. It means sacrificing (older grandparents can’t mow their lawns or shovel walks–but teenage kids can!) and bearing with one another’s infirmities–but I see this as being so important. There are few things I would get more excited about than one or both of my children’s grandparents deciding to move to Peoria. I don’t expect it to happen–both of them are happy where they are at and I don’t fault them for that–it was my decision to move here.
The next best thing, though, is to plan to stay here and to make sure I am where my grandchildren can see me.