Dear Friends,

So, James Howell’s 40 Treasured Verses will take us into sabbath territory this coming Sunday.

Which means my Monday task is to somehow move myself (and anyone who reads this blog and attends worship at NRPC) past a “those were the good ol’ days” frame of mind. (Spoiler alert: I’ll need to do the same thing in the sermon itself, so if you are reading this blog and will somehow hear the sermon, be prepared that you’ll get a double dose of moving past a “those were the days” frame of mind. Sorry-not-sorry.)

To help myself across that gap, I started looking for images of the so-called “good old days.” Here’s a smattering of what I found: Transistor radios. CRT televisions. A manual typewriter. Skeleton keys. Steam engines. And lots of tractors; LOTS of tractors. [Sidebar: there was also a cassette tape? Which made me want to ask, “Those were somebody’s good old days??” I definitely miss the mixtape that I left in a rental car in about 1990, but I wouldn’t call those my good ol’ days! End of sidebar] Then there were all the black and white images: A smiling young girl in pony tails holding a big ol’ glass of milk. A woman in high-heel slippers and a dressing gown smiling at herself in a mirror. A man walking along the sidewalk in a suit, topcoat and fedora. A couple of young boys holding their model airplanes while eyeballing a prop plane. Then there’s Edith and Archie. (The folks in the cover shot, in case you were curious. Check out All in the Family, if you need to. or just want to.)

Interesting, the way nostalgia works. I’m so glad the little girl seemed to be enjoying her glass of milk - I expect the water in her tap wasn’t fluoridated. (Unless she happened to live in Grand Rapids in 1945, in which case she might’ve been on the early edge of that new development. Or so says the CDC website, anyway). And, while I can understand that the days of stricter gender roles made Archie’s life easier, I for one am glad we are past the days when women are reduced to “pretty” while men are meant to “produce.”

Of course, I have my own notions of when and how the good old days were. But those fond memories are probably failing to see the full picture, too. More than that, life moves forward, not backward. Fond memories are one thing; jonesing for a time machine is something else entirely. While I might wish stores were still closed for a sabbath, youth sports paused on Sundays, and work could wait for a few blinking hours, the world we’re in is the world we’ve got.

So, this coming Sunday, I have no intention of pining for what was. Rather, you can expect that I’ll be inviting us to find new ways to observe Sabbath in the here and now. ‘Cuz I’m more nostalgic for a world where we strive to honor God’s law than I am longing to go back to anybody’s notion of the so-called good old days.

See you Sunday!

Peace,

Lisa

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons