How Shall We Then Live? Part One

The following is my address to a small group of homeschooled high school graduates (minus my introductions). Because of it's length, I will post in series over a few days.


The 1960s and 1970s were a time of upheaval, civil unrest and change. It's the world in which I grew up. We faced the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, drugs, the crumbling of society, the decay of the church, the breakdown of public education, race riots, the assassination of Kennedy, and Woodstock. I can remember as a small child driving into Chicago with my parents for a visit to the doctor and having to take a detour around a certain part of town because Martin Luther King, Jr. was speaking, and there were open riots in the streets. My sister, in her freshman year of high school had to keep her lunch under lock and key and guard it while she ate, because students were dropping LSD into other student's food. One summer, construction workers arrived at the public elementary school I attended and smashed down the interior walls. The next fall students were subjected to the new experiment of "open classrooms". In 5th grade, I was chosen to be an experiment for "individualized math" which was nothing more than a free hour to goof off in school every day while my fellow students actually learned something.

Even so, as a child and a teen, I was almost oblivious to what was going on around me. My parents pulled me out of the public school system when I was 12 years old and put me and my sisters in a private Christian school. Ours was one of the first Christian (protestant) schools in Illinois. My mother and father, who loved God first above all things, were willing to do what they believed was the right thing for their children in the face of opposition...and there was great opposition to private Christian schools in those days. The graduates of my high school and other schools like it became the pioneers of the home school movement. Some of the parents sitting in this room are part of my generation, and they, like my parents, in the face of opposition, forged forward and choose the education they believed to be the best for their children. If it were not for their efforts, we would not be here tonight.

Each era has its challenges, but some seem to be worse than others. Again, we are staring in the face of an evil age, and one far worse in many ways than what my generation faced, because the restraints of evil which were securely in place when I was a child have been thrown off, and men and women seem to feel no shame at doing whatever they please no matter how wicked it is. Goodness seems to be dying. Where are the righteous?

Tonight, you will walk out that door and officially being your life as an adult. Soon you will make choices about your career, your education, your politics and your relationships. You will decide where to live, where to go to church; but none of these decisions will make any difference in the long run if you haven't answered the question: "How Shall We Then Live?"

This question is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer written during the great upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. I have to admit, I've never read it completely, but the title haunted me for years. As I faced the world around me, as I faced the decisions of life: who to marry, where to go to school, where to live, where to work, it was a question for which I needed an answer. And it is the question for which you need an answer. Because the Word of God teaches us that this world and all that is in it, is nothing more than place to hang our hats for a little while. It is who we are and what we do while we are here that matters.


Comments

I lived through those years and even my first two years of college were at San Francisco State during the time of the hippies. In my sophomore year President Kennedy was shot. I was on speed legally, to lose weight--a design of my mom to get me slim and it wrecked my health.

Fortunately I went on to my last two years at a Christian college where Francis Shaeffer himself spoke for the spiritual emphasis week. What a treat!

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