There are some things about our lives we have no control to change. One, we cannot change the time in history we were born or lived. Another is the parents we were born to. I have so many questions I wish I could ask my parents about their lives but no they are not here anymore.
My father was born and raised in a city in California and my mother was born and raised on a farm in Missouri. They each had very different experiences growing up. I did get to ask them what it was like going through the Great Depression. They were around 12 and 14 years old at this time in history. Dad’s father was a builder but at this time there was no money to build. Dad said he remembered standing in bread lines to get food. As a child I remember my dad putting pieces of bread in a bowl, pouring milk over it and eating it with a spoon. He said he liked it and remembered being so thankful for each bite. Mom, however, living on a farm said that time in history didn’t seem much different than any other day. They had all the homegrown food they always had. She did remember the time when Grandad had harvested all the wheat and had some stacked in the barn lot. The government men came to the house and burned many of the stacks of wheat. Mom remembered Grandad on the back porch with tears in his eyes asking if he could give some of the wheat to his neighbors that were starving. The answer was no.
I’m sure there are many things that have happened in our lifetime that we do not understand. We will all have different opinions depending on our knowledge of the situation. We cannot change the time in history we are living, neither could our ancestors. Ester was born “for such a time as this.” She had things happen in her lifetime that were hard to understand.
In my lifetime there have been men who have gone to the moon, men in space stations, scientific advances have been made. There have been wars, rumors of wars. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Protests, lives lost. School shootings, Civil Rights marches, destructive floods and tornadoes, the World Trade Center attack, Covid pandemic, the first test tube baby, the first cloned mammal. Also, Alaska and Hawaii became our 49th and 50th states. The internet, smartphones, MRI scanners, personal computers, bar codes and lasers have also come in the last 70 years. Man continues to reach out for a better way of finding knowledge and advancing our livelihood. The struggles continue, the battle of good and evil continues. This is the time in history we are living in. We were not given the choice of when we were born.
The best advice I can give is Matthew 22: 37 – 39 Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
God Bless You Neighbor,
Grandma Lynn
“Packer and Stacker”