Post by Deleted on Jul 13, 2009 16:54:44 GMT -5
My thirteen-year-old son, Stanley. What next?
"If we say forty, fifty and sixty," Stanley asked me today, working alongside me in the metal shop, "why don't we say wunty instead of ten, and tewty instead of twenty?"
This, quite naturally, led to why we don't write wun instead of one and tew instead of two. "Just think, wunty-wun, wunty-tew, tewty-three, threety four. . . . Everything would be so much simpler to explain, so much easier to understand."
With all the enthusiasm of young chaps onto a bright idea, Stanley and his ten-year-old brother Julian, tried selling me the advantages of their break-through for the English-speaking world. Smiling to myself, remembering how recently I was the boy with the brain-waves, I set out to explain why we humans usually keep on doing what doesn't make sense, simply "because we have always done it that way," "everyone else does it too," and "that is what we must do to be understood."
How familiar my logic sounded (for as strange as it still seems to be saying instead of hearing it). . . . And how much it reminded me of what many of you young people are writing to me about -- from New Zealand, from America, from Germany, from Canada and Venezuela and India and around the world.
Everywhere it is the same. "Kinder und Narren sprechen die Wahrheit (children and fools speak the truth)." Young sincere people like you, if you should have a fair go, would keep life simple. But not all are sincere. Today's society has duped and corrupted many of your generation, while those (of my generation) that profess to be mature keep making life more complicated all the time.
Conventions strangle us. The rules we have made up for ourselves through many centuries of higgledy-piggledy (like the rules of the English language of which no-one remembers their logic or origin) keep us bound. We shrug our shoulders. We grin helplessly. "We must go on doing it like this," we tell one another, "because we have lost the power to change."
Is that so?
No generation in human history has changed as much or as rapidly as ours. Beginning with the first World War, and picking up speed into the present, the society in which we live, our environment as a whole, has changed beyond measure -- for the worse.
Rampant, uncontrolled change. But all of it change in one direction -- toward ever greater materialism, immorality, violence, destruction.
No, we have not lost the power to change. We change quickly and easily, like a pear or a bucket of milk left standing in the sun. The only change we cannot bring about, by ourselves, is change for the better.
Change to a simpler way. To purity. To wholesome peace. Changing from the complexities of a post-modern world to the pristine truth of God.
Will we live -- as we sing in the Shakers' song -- to see true simplicity again?
Do not lose heart. Young men and women, if you hold to your vision, we may! Listen, but also think. Do not be afraid. Remember where you came from and look carefully where you go. Take heed to the voice of experience but follow no-one or nothing other than Christ.
The better you know him the less complicated everything will get. Truth is simple. Wisdom, for those that fear God, is free. And from what you are telling me (you who are young, sincere, seeking for truth, from around the world) I feel confident that you will find it and flourish while my son Stanley works his way through the wunties, you through what you have left of the tewties and threeties, and the rest of us continue on through the forties and fifties and sixties until we all stand with Christ in a new creation, new heavens and a new earth, fully restored, everything set right, everything as simple as it ought to be and making sense at last, for the glory of God.
May God help us.
Peter
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au
"If we say forty, fifty and sixty," Stanley asked me today, working alongside me in the metal shop, "why don't we say wunty instead of ten, and tewty instead of twenty?"
This, quite naturally, led to why we don't write wun instead of one and tew instead of two. "Just think, wunty-wun, wunty-tew, tewty-three, threety four. . . . Everything would be so much simpler to explain, so much easier to understand."
With all the enthusiasm of young chaps onto a bright idea, Stanley and his ten-year-old brother Julian, tried selling me the advantages of their break-through for the English-speaking world. Smiling to myself, remembering how recently I was the boy with the brain-waves, I set out to explain why we humans usually keep on doing what doesn't make sense, simply "because we have always done it that way," "everyone else does it too," and "that is what we must do to be understood."
How familiar my logic sounded (for as strange as it still seems to be saying instead of hearing it). . . . And how much it reminded me of what many of you young people are writing to me about -- from New Zealand, from America, from Germany, from Canada and Venezuela and India and around the world.
Everywhere it is the same. "Kinder und Narren sprechen die Wahrheit (children and fools speak the truth)." Young sincere people like you, if you should have a fair go, would keep life simple. But not all are sincere. Today's society has duped and corrupted many of your generation, while those (of my generation) that profess to be mature keep making life more complicated all the time.
Conventions strangle us. The rules we have made up for ourselves through many centuries of higgledy-piggledy (like the rules of the English language of which no-one remembers their logic or origin) keep us bound. We shrug our shoulders. We grin helplessly. "We must go on doing it like this," we tell one another, "because we have lost the power to change."
Is that so?
No generation in human history has changed as much or as rapidly as ours. Beginning with the first World War, and picking up speed into the present, the society in which we live, our environment as a whole, has changed beyond measure -- for the worse.
Rampant, uncontrolled change. But all of it change in one direction -- toward ever greater materialism, immorality, violence, destruction.
No, we have not lost the power to change. We change quickly and easily, like a pear or a bucket of milk left standing in the sun. The only change we cannot bring about, by ourselves, is change for the better.
Change to a simpler way. To purity. To wholesome peace. Changing from the complexities of a post-modern world to the pristine truth of God.
Will we live -- as we sing in the Shakers' song -- to see true simplicity again?
Do not lose heart. Young men and women, if you hold to your vision, we may! Listen, but also think. Do not be afraid. Remember where you came from and look carefully where you go. Take heed to the voice of experience but follow no-one or nothing other than Christ.
The better you know him the less complicated everything will get. Truth is simple. Wisdom, for those that fear God, is free. And from what you are telling me (you who are young, sincere, seeking for truth, from around the world) I feel confident that you will find it and flourish while my son Stanley works his way through the wunties, you through what you have left of the tewties and threeties, and the rest of us continue on through the forties and fifties and sixties until we all stand with Christ in a new creation, new heavens and a new earth, fully restored, everything set right, everything as simple as it ought to be and making sense at last, for the glory of God.
May God help us.
Peter
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au