time and again (and again and again and again)

Well, if I didn’t already know that the modern age is BEYOND HOPE OF REDEMPTION, Jack Finney's time travel novel, Time and Again, would have proven it to me. It criticizes 1970s America for the same problems we have now (plus a few degrees of severity, thanks to the Internet Explosion).

It seems the faddish thing to do these days... that is, to criticize these days. Kids nowabout are illiterate. People just don't know how to talk to each other anymore. The millenials are going to ruin America. Nobody even tries to do anything before they turn 30 anymore. And on, and on, and on.

Maybe they have a point.

Finney's narrator observes of the people in the 1880s (where he has traveled):

There was an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone. ... The faces [of the people] were animated, they were glad to be just where they were, alive in that moment and place. ... Above all, they carried with them a sense of purpose. You could see that: they weren't bored, for God's sake! Just looking at them, I'm convinced that those men moved through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being. And that's something worth having, and losing it is to lose something vital.

I mostly appreciate what he's saying. 

To be glad for the sake of life, and not in that sappy 'well, I guess I can be happy to be alive' way, but really grateful for the things around me... that's beautiful.

To know definitively that there is reason behind the story of my life... that's beautiful.

And without these things, yeah, life is going to kind of suck.

Finney implies pretty heavily that we've lost the 1880s' sense of life. And I think that is very unfair.

I've been listening to Tim Keller in the mornings for the past week or so (I swear nobody's paying me to endorse him. I just want to share the awesome), and the one thing that comes through almost every sermon is: When I place my hope in Christ, I change; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control begin to spring up in my heart in a way impossible before.

So when I look at a group of people utterly changed by the love of God, they look like the people Finney is describing. Even if they are Modern to the utmost, they maintain vitality and beauty.

And what we have now that the people in the 1880s didn't have? Separation. The margin between the Joyful and the Despondent is wider; there are fewer people caught in the lukewarm soup between them... which means that people shouldn't have to figure out time travel to see people whose radiance they envy. That should be us.

Even though it would be cool to dress like this... and really. The Third Great Awakening. Charles Spurgeon!! etc.

This post is brought to you in part by Tim Chester, Steve Timmis, Tim Keller, and probably other things that aren't Jack Finney.