I once heard a man at the height of a heated debate ask the other, “How old are you?” When his opponent responded “23,” the questioner said “Well, I’m 34. Have you ever been 34 before? Because I’ve been 23.”
It was a line in jest that may have been clever enough then, but now? We’re in an age where 11 years is an eternity. The explosion in technology – and (frighteningly) the ability to exploit and manipulate others through it – has made our world nearly unrecognizable from the world of just a few decades ago.
So one must wonder, what would Bob Fraleigh know about growing up today? Seriously. I grew up in a world where privacy on the phone meant stretching the cord across the hall into my sisters’ bedroom. I didn’t know how to type until I was out of high school. When I bought my first computer, I was too cheap to spring for the 1MB of RAM upgrade. And that when I was already 25 years old.
These thoughts came to mind when I heard someone talking about maturity and social media today. They said something for the younger generation that I thought important: “You are crafting an older you.” What you are doing now in your youth sets the course for your adult life. We know this. There are plenty of books out there that work off of this premise. Probably most famous, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, starts with the simple things we learned young, like “share everything” and “play fair.” But since it’s unlikely a kindergartner will grasp the gravity of these lessons, this and so many other books about parenting these children sell big. Unfortunately, the self-help industry is a testament that at least a significant portion of those parenting books aren’t working. And why? Because if you don’t have it down early, it’s unquestionably hard – some would say impossible – to fix.
I’m sure part of the problem is that we only see well-curated public personas that have us convinced that life has been nothing but wonderful for all of our “friends.” It’s easy to think so when all you see are the most interesting and lighthearted snippets of those lives, but at the risk of sounding cliché, I can assure you – life is hard. It is most likely some variation of a dull existence that drudges on in a quiet, repetitive way. Sure, we do what we can to punctuate that existence with something we feel worthy of sharing, but then there’s the other 90-plus percent of it. Ask anyone who’s been around a while to be honest and they’ll tell you they’re more often faced with the opposite – the jerk who annoys them (in cars, stores, offices, etc.), the boss who seems to hate them, the spouse who disagrees with them for whatever reason (I mean, if nearly 50 percent of marriages in the US end in divorce, things can’t all be vacations in the Med, can they?).
And it all starts with this stubborn resistance to forming ourselves as decent human beings while we’re growing up. By the time we hit our 20s (even before), we’ve cemented in our psyches this idea that if we just keep doing it a certain way – that is, our way – we’ll have that wonderful life we keep seeing on the social medias. But if we think it’s right to be overbearing, cutesy, or manipulative to get our way – and we think we’re getting away with it in our youth – we’ll turn into that kind of person who can no longer do anything about it when we need to.
Not surprisingly though, kids aren’t really the best at self-reflection. Sure, they think of themselves a lot – a whole lot of angst and worry about fitting in and such – but that’s not self-reflection. It’s about what others are seeing in them, even lying to the world to put on the face they think will sell.
So here’s where Bob Fraleigh – and countless other thoughtful adults I’m sure – might have something of value to say. I’d love to just grab them by the shoulders and look them in the eyes and say “so much of this stuff doesn’t matter!” I wish it was that easy. And maybe it is. I spent 27 years in the Air Force, and it wasn’t until I was nearly finished that I finally had someone do something like that to me and it made such an impact that if he’d been there 20 years earlier, my career (and my life) would have been significantly different (and for the better, I’m sure). I would have been a better person all around; more confident, and more able to give of myself.
And if I were to have my shoulder-grabbing eyeball-to-eyeball moment with young men and women today, I’d be obligated to hit the key points:
– It’s important to get along with other people.
– It’s important to listen to them and consider their thoughts and opinions.
– It’s important to be polite and considerate.
– It’s important to look at things from other perspectives and ask, “Could I be wrong about this?”
– It’s important to think things through and avoid rash decisions.
Listen, this isn’t new stuff. But if you’ve noticed, I focus mostly on taking yourself down a notch and actually considering others. There are certainly times you’ll be right (even a broken clock is right twice a day), maybe even most of the time. But if you don’t consistently consider others – and the more “others” involved, the more complex the consideration – you will lose in the end.
You might think I’m sitting here telling you to “look at Bob – he’s so good at considering others.” Nope. It’s a constant struggle. Like I said, life is hard enough, and I’m not always helpful to my own cause (although I suppose recognizing the fact that I could be the jerk in the other car is part of the process).
But this does lead me to another point, and it’s something about which I speak from personal experience. While it’s hard to change those habits to which you’ve become attached early in life, we can’t lose hope. The Bible tells us that anyone who comes to faith in Jesus is a new creation. The old you is replaced by a new you. Does this mean that those bad habits go away in the blink of an eye? Not at all. But I am saying that something changes. Those old habits start to gnaw at you. For me personally, there were a couple of issues that changed right away: I did them, I believed them…and then I didn’t. It was that easy. But there are still other things about my life with which I continue to struggle.
The Bible has plenty of verses that exhort us to humble ourselves, but there is one thing that a Christian should keep in mind above all others: that Jesus, who in giving us everything that we are and would be justified in demanding nothing less than our lives for him, humbled himself to the point of dying for us (and all of those bad habits that make us the selfish slugs we are). There’s a story in the Bible that tells us how that works. It’s been called the parable of the ungrateful servant and it goes something like this: A man who owed a huge sum to his king and couldn’t pay it back begged for more time. The king did even better – he cancelled the debt completely. But when that man walked out and found another who owed him a small sum but couldn’t repay, he had him thrown in jail [read Matthew 18:21-35 for the full story – it doesn’t end well for the ungrateful servant when the king finds out].
And so to the Christian, the underlying motivation for change is in this knowledge that we have been forgiven so much more than we can repay. This being so, how can we not be gracious and kind to others in matters that pale in comparison? [I won’t go into the role of the Holy Spirit in this right now]
To treat others poorly and to put one’s own interests continuously before theirs is not a sign of change. There is no new creation at work in this person. That we have been forgiven so much by one who humbled himself to his very death for us should make the action easy, but sadly it is not always so.
It’s hard. We need help. But thankfully, the Christian has that help. We have a promise. It may take a good portion of a lifetime (if not the entire thing), but there is a reward in the taking of that journey. And part of that reward is in being better than the adult that was formed in an ignorant and impatient youth.