By: Denny

1957 photo of our family in front of the 1950 Studebaker. I’m wearing the hat.

One of my favorite memories as a kid was visiting my grandparents. They lived about an hour’s drive from our house. In the mid 1950’s there were four of us kids. Mom and dad would put us in the back seat of the 1950 Studebaker and then off we’d go. If you’re a parent, you already know what the first question coming from the back seat was within five minutes. “Are we there yet?” followed by, “When are we going to get there?” I’m sure my parents were thinking, “Not soon enough.” This was no picnic for them as often the one-hour drive would be interrupted by a frantic plea, “I have to go pee!” There weren’t any convenience stores then, so dad would pull onto the shoulder, and you did your business. Of course, in the winter you remembered to go before we left home or hold it until grandma’s house. If you think putting four kids in the rear seat of a car for one hour would be a peaceful trip, you should try it sometime. Back then there weren’t any video screens that popped out from the ceiling or back of the front seat to show movies, no handheld video games or other modern technical devises that keep kids occupied today. We had to make our own entertainment. I don’t think the car even had a radio so mom would get us to sing along with some popular kid’s songs. How many times can a kid sing Old McDonald or Row, Row, Row Your Boat until it drives everybody in the car crazy? If you can remember playing the alphabet game, I spy, counting the “X marks the spot” signs in the ditches, reading aloud the Burma Shave signs as you passed each one, or being the first to spot a VW Beetle car; then you know what I’m talking about. All that was good for about another 30 – 40 minutes, then came the whining and complaining, “Move over, you’re crowding me!” “Mom, he hit me, or “Mom, she pinched me!” We were normal self-centered kids and that was the only reason or excuse we needed to fight and argue. By this time, I’m sure my parents were thinking, “Are we there yet!” It was usually dad, who after he’d had enough of our bickering would shout something like this: “If you kids don’t knock it off, I’m coming back there and give you all something to cry about!” I can remember one time he threatened to put us out on the side of the road and make us walk the rest of the way. That never happened because that idea didn’t set too well with mom. The usual solution was to have one of us sit up front between them, (cars had bench seats back then) which made for more room in the back but started another argument amongst us as to who would get that envied spot. Everyone was quiet after that, and I think my parents only enjoyed the remaining five minutes left of our whole trip.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were special times to visit grandma and grandpa. As soon as you opened the door the aroma of home cooking made you take a deep breath, hold it for a second, then let it out with a satisfying aaahhh. All the women stayed in the kitchen helping to prepare the meal or setting the tables, which seemed secondary to all their chatting and catching up on things. The men gathered in the living room and talked about guy things until dinner was ready. Afterwards the women would clean off the table and do the dishes, all the while continuing their chatting. Grandpa would settle into his favorite chair and light his pipe, while others found a comfortable spot for a nap. Many of our cousins were there to play with. If there was snow on the ground, we would walk to the big sledding hill behind their house near the water tower. We’d all come back cold and exhausted. Grandma would have some hot chocolate ready with some desert and ice cream. She always had Schwann’s in the big round tub size like you see in ice cream parlors. Maplenut was grandpa’s favorite, and she usually had a second flavor to choose also. Grandpa was a big fan of pro wrestling, and when his show came on TV, we were all expected to be quiet. We would tease him by saying it was all fake. He claimed it was real and would give us a tap with his cane if we weren’t quiet and within reach. Those were good days and memories. It was usually dark when we headed home. Us kids were tired, but not to the point of not arguing about who would get the coveted back window ledge to sleep on. One of us would get that, another got the seat, the third one ended up on the floor, and the last one up front between mom and dad. All I can remember after that was our parents waking us up by saying, “We’re Home” and me wondering, “How did we get here so quickly.”

I’m seventy years old now and find more than ever that I’m asking myself that same question. Now, the “here” that I wonder about is the social, political, and spiritual condition of the good old USA that I grew up in. Did I somehow take a nap like Rip Van Winkle and wake up 65 years later, or did the changes happen so incrementally that I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t notice. Obviously, it was the latter. Maybe it wasn’t so much that I wasn’t paying attention, but rather just content that nobody was bothering me living out my ordinary life according to my values. Those values are a combination of what our parents taught us and now even more so what the Bible instructs. By the way, our parents were watchful in countering and protecting us from anything that would be detrimental or contrary to their values. Many times, they would tell us, “We don’t care what your friends are allowed to do.” These days many kids are raised by absent parents with screwed up values. They have no one to guide and direct them into truth. Rather than “Train up a child in the way they should go” as it says in Proverbs 23:6, parents will encourage and support their kids to discover “who they really are”. How wonderful if little Billy thinks he’s a girl, or at the age of seven claims he is gay. Maybe they should recheck his plumbing, or better yet, their minds. As when God asked Adam, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11), I can now imagine him asking, “Who told you that you were LGBTQ?” Everyone is entitled to their own value system which guides and dictates their beliefs and behaviors. The problem comes when people use political powers and the public schools to force the values of a minority upon the majority. I don’t know when it started, but I began to be aware of it in the late 1960’s. Each consecutive decade seems to have brought us a crumbling and further deterioration of truth. Change or alter what is truth, and you change the values of people. Change the values of people and you can direct the course of a nation. It starts by changing or controlling the language. Gay used to mean happy. Murder is now choice. Coming out of the closet was what we did when found playing hide and seek. Intolerant, haters, bigot, hypocrite among others are words that this evil society uses to define anyone who dares to challenge their perverted Woke value system. Christians who stand for Biblical truth are now in the minority and the main target. So, it has evolved that the values once held by a minority have infiltrated and polluted the majority so that Isaiah 5:20 cries out, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” And where has the church been in stemming the tide against the onslaught of evil? Fast asleep in the back seat. Is evil too strong or harsh of a word for you to hear? Then as we used to say as kids, “Tough toenails.” Good and evil are what God calls it. For years denominational and many other churches have relinquished and compromised their standards of Biblical truth to appease, accommodate, and make themselves more appealing to unrepentant sinners and the Woke crowd. They’ve sought position and favor of men rather than praise from God, so that their gospel is a watered-down lukewarm version of handpicked partial truths with a redefined Jesus. Like self-centered kids fighting and quarreling in the back seat of a car, sometimes I wish God would say, “If you guys don’t knock it off, I’m coming down there to give you all something to cry about!”

In Matthew 13:24-30 Jesus told the parable of the Wheat and Tares. Basically, a farmer sowed good wheat seed in a field. At night, while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed tares on the same field. He did it because he was an enemy and knew that the result would be a polluted harvest of a lesser yield. Tares are a weed that looks exactly like wheat while growing, but near harvest produces black seeds very distinct from the gold color of wheat. The servants wanted to pluck out the tares, but the farmer said no because in so doing they would damage the wheat. Another possibility the enemy had hoped for also. The farmer said leave them alone and separate the two at harvest, we’ll burn the tares and gather the wheat into the barn. Someday, and it might be sooner than we think, God will instruct His angels to gather in the harvest of all souls. He will separate the wheat from the tares, the sheep from the goats, the believers from unbelievers, the Awake from the Woke, and those in the front seat with Him from those sleeping in the back seat. It won’t be pretty, because then, He will give them something to cry about as it says in Matthew 8:12, “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I’m thinking that for a vast majority of people now might be a good time to rethink and realign both their values and ideology so that it’s more in sync with biblical truth. How tragic it will be to be suddenly awakened and finding themselves in a place they hadn’t anticipated, separated from God, and saying, “How did we get here?”