In the spirit of the month I thought it would be appropriate to take a walk down memory lane.  Remeber Steve Eyl?  Joe Hilman?  Ricky Calloway?  Dean Garrett?  Bobby Knight and Steve Alford?  Keith Smart?  Re-live that One Shining Moment. 

Rough Draft:

 I want to develop the last article a little further.  The baby boomer generation lack of compromise and commitment has helped to erode our societies sense of community.  The  nucleus of the family is destroyed, the loyalty to geographic location is gone, the loyalty to local stores is gone, the loyalty to denomination is gone.  It is here I want to rest for awhile.  The younger generation is so longing for community, particularly within the church.  Read a few blogs and you will quickly find it is all the rage among 30 something pastors right now.  It is has been lost and they are grasping to find it.  The problem is the community of the church is not one that is instantly established.  It existed 50 years ago, because you had 2 or 3 generations all within the same church.  Your parents were Baptist, you were Baptist, but not only Baptist, but you went to the church you grew up in.  This established accountability.  People did not just know who you are today, but they knew your past, your short comings, your change, your family history, how committed you had been in the past, etc.  And the people that know these things are not just people that you like and have everything in common with, such as age, children, income, etc, but is spread over generations and personalities.  The next generation is now coming along, not wanting the tradition, wanting something new, but longing for community.  Sometimes I fear the want the feeling of the community, but with autonomy and freedom.  The want to live in New York city and have it feel like Hickory, Indiana.  However, true community appears to come at the loss of once autonomy and freedom.  This kind of true communitycannot happen overnight or with the formation of a new program.  This can give one a sense of community, but the fullness of community takes time, involvement, and commitment to build.  So, keep longing for community, but establish something that will be left for generations to come.  We, as the upcoming generation, need to be careful to not overthrow all traditions, but preserve what we can to help establish this community.  We need to root ourselves in the local church, and lose ourselves and identities within the body.  We need to not chase the latest fads, but stay the course.  We need to be faithful and committed.  And if we are committed within this community it means we will learn to compromise our wants and our desires for the betterment of the whole.

Dr. Mohler of Southern Seminary had an interesting post yesterday entitled, A Cry From the Heart of a Generation — The Pain of Divorce, in which he draws from an article written in a college newspaper. The student begins the article with several raw thoughts:

Those of us on our way out of

Northern Illinois University are getting to the point in our lives when we start looking for spouses and thinking about kids. My advice today is not to have them. At least, not yet.

If there’s one thing I need no citation or research to prove, it’s that our parents have done a pretty horrendous job bringing us up…Since the Baby Boomer generation has gotten so much fun out of naming us hurtful and insensitive things like “Generation Me,” “Generation Why,” “Generation A.D.D.” or the “Entitlement Generation,” we should perhaps return the favor and start calling them “Generation Divorce.”

He then points out what he has seen in the example of his parent’s generation:

Our parents were so repulsed by the idea of the scrubbed-clean “Pleasantville” 1950s nuclear family that they have divorced in record numbers, and the lesson I see they’ve taught us is that compromise and fidelity are no longer in vogue. We’re seeing it with more women marrying older, couples staying in long-term relationships without committing to marriage, crippling divorce rates and the ideal family now becoming a minority in our country.

His conclusion:

Marry late, and marry once, and don’t have kids until you can love them, nurture them, pay for them and teach them there is such a thing in life as two people who cannot be severed.

I see the actions of this baby boomer generation far more outreaching than divorce in the home. We have seen a generation that is unwilling to compromise or submit one to another. Some are left with no example of how to prefer someone else above themselves. We see little commitment to anything. There is no brand loyalty, no denominational loyalty, no geographical loyalty, and no marriage loyalty. It is time for the church to demonstrate true greatness. It is not found in rights and being true to yourself or blazing a trail, but in being the servant of all, a willingness to lay down one’s life for others. We need to learn to compromise, not our morals, but our preferences or our own way.

Many times I get to tuck Tyler in for bed at night. We often read and sing and do the usually. He got a new book about Bible stories the other night and it has a few stories about creation. We read two and then I asked him a few questions. Here is how it went:

Me: Tyler, who made you? Who made Tyler?

Ty: God made Tyler.

Me: Yes, God made Tyler. Who made Daddy?

Ty: Somebody cool!

When he is a teenager I hope to remind him about that.