Grand View University - Viking Yearbook (Des Moines, IA)

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Change Change is inevitable! The old Romans had a proverb for this when they said: Tempus fugit, which means time runs away. Modern America puts it differently. It says Time Marches On. Can there be a different approach and evaluation in the two sayings? There may be a difference of age involved. Rome was oldg its time was running out. America is young and just beginning to move, or so it thinks. When you are young and hopeful, time marches on. When you are baldish and nearing fifty, time runs away. Change comes with time, but change has many different paces. The airplane circles the world in non-stop flight and Mark Twain's famous ride down a glacier would have carried him few feet in a year. Is life like the rocket or like the glacier? Attitudes differ. The youngster says: I'll try anything once, but the old fossil protests: l'm opposedto any change, even for the better. A conservative has been defined as a person who will never do anything for the first time, and a radical as one who will never do any- thing except for the first time. Historians tell us that the world has changed more during the last few decades than during any comparable period in history. One may well believe it, and one may shudder at the thought. Even I have had the privilege of living in both the horse-and-buggy days and the atomic age. I am happy that this is the case, but I am not sure that I am happy at the accelerated rate of change. Too many valuable things disappear too fast. When I was a small boy in Tyler-the phrase has a magic though nostalgic ring-we lived in the horse-and-buggy days. Automobiles were a sensational novelty, as were electric lights and moving pictures. On Sunday mornings there was no line of cars before the church. Everyone came by means of some horse-drawn vehicle. There were surreys, some with fringes and some without, top-buggys, spring wagons and lumber wagons, and in the winter there were sleighs and bobsleds. The ladies and children were bundled up with coats and Shawls and blankets for the several-mile excursion, and the men proudly handled the lines of a frisky team. Unloading the passengers at the church, the driver moved on to the barns where the team was stabled during the services. In retrospect there was a glamour about those days which even the thrill of the oncoming automobile cannot erase. The memory is nostalgic, which means that it brings the sweet sentimental pain of a return which cannot be made in reality. But no one wants to return, even though he might. We do no want to sacrifice the comfort and efficiency of the modern ways for the glamour of a day which meant far more work and greater discomfort. Why then bother even discussing the matter. Let it be the theme of a day-dream in an idle moment, and let us live in the world that is ours today. The point is, however, that we have lost more than the surrey with the fringe-on-the-top. If it were only that, we could go down to see Oklahoma on its perennial return and be satisfied. The important fact is not that everyone came to church in a horse-drawn vehicle. The fact is that everyone came, period. The old folks could be seen in their customary place in the pews every Sunday, and the young folks filled the spacious gallery every Sunday. Everyone went to church every Sunday. This is not so any more. For a while the automobile replaced the buggy at the church door, but now it has become just as significant a factor in carrying people away from the church. It is not my intention to discuss the significance of going to church -11-

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Pastor Johannes Knudsen, Ph. D., S.T.M., M.A President of Grand View College -1o- e

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every Sunday. We have too much professional preaching about that subject and too little preaching that could nelp fill the churches. My point is that while we admit that change is inevitable and concede that some things not only cannot be brought back but should not be brought back, we must also realize that some of the changes are very unfortunate and that they are only inevitably, because we do not adjust ourselves to the fact of change. Perhaps the fact that change is coming about so rapidly has something to do with the loss of valuable things. We do not have time to adjust ourselves to changeg some things have to go, so we let too many things go. To put some of these observations into orderly form, let us say that change is inevitable and that we must adjust ourselves to change. Change can go on at different rates of speed, however, and there is danger in too rapid a change. Some things must go and can only be retained at a loss to the moderns who use them and to the detriment of the things themselves. Other things need not change, if the right adjustments are made and efforts are made to keep them. If they go, our loss is great. lt is then up to us to decide what we want to keep and what efforts we want to make for preservation. Some groups try almost desperately to maintain the externals of life, to retain the clothes, the customs, and even the tools of a day long since faded away. Such groups not only try in vain to stem the glacier of change, they make a mistake of identification. They fail to understand that external things must change and they identify externals with char- acter. Others make the mistake, lesser in extent but just as great in scope, in believing that only externals change and that minds and morals go on unchanged from age to age. They wake up some day to discover that they are out of touch with life and that they have lost the oppor- tunity to make adjustments. On the other hand, we find that content is often discarded with custom, principles of living with habits of living, and this is equally tragic. Just as true as the fact that externals must change, just as true is it that principles do not change. If they did, they would not be prin- ciples. And along with principles go basic ways which we can discard or violate only at the cost of the principles or with serious damage to them. It is easy to enumerate such principles and such ways, and we can all see how important they are and how much they are threatened by the rapidity of change. They are such principles as honesty, justice, purity, freedom and responsibility, and they are expressed in ways of living such as democracy, community living, home life, etc. We can lose our values by failing to preserve them in the rapid turn-over of change, and we can lose them by failing to adjust them to the change that is inevitable. Time marches on and time runs away! Let us take the home. A few decades ago the home was still the center of living. It formed an essential part of church and community life, but it was the most important immediate nucleus of living for young as well as old. It was a refuge and a reservoir. It was a living and vital thing in the existence of all. Today the home is in danger of disintegration. It has fallen into disrespect to the extent that a frightening percentage of homes are dis- solved by divorce. It has been pointed out that we are in the same situa- tion of moral decay which the Roman Empire experienced shortly before its collapse. One of the basic pillars of society and human living is crumbling and with it goes many of the finest values in life. The reason? Partly that we have given ourselves uncritically over to change and have failed to see what was going on. To some extent we are excused, because the change has come about so quickly that we -12-