Do we long for the good old days when life was simpler?  Was there really such a time?

One of my forefathers left England 375 years ago because the law required him to attend his local parish church, where he found no spiritual sustenance.  He crossed the ocean to begin a new life in the unsettled wilds of what is now Massachusetts.

Another was born to a well-established family in France — just before the Revolution.  He later served as a swordsman in Napoleon’s army, lost his wife somewhere along the way, then brought his young family to upstate New York 185 years ago.  My mother’s grandparents left Ukraine 140 years ago to settle in Manitoba.

They lived through wars, revolutions, recessions, depressions, droughts, famines, extreme heat, extreme cold, insect plagues and epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, tuberculosis and polio.  There were countless heartaches as young mothers died in childbirth and epidemics claimed the lives of young children.

My father witnessed technological change equal to anything in our lifetime.  He was born in Iowa in 1891 and homesteaded in Saskatchewan seventeen years later with his father and two older brothers.  They broke land with oxen and threshed grain with a steam powered threshing machine.  Gasoline powered tractors, combines, automobiles, aeroplanes, telephones, radio, TV, home electrification, antibiotics, insulin, plastics and credit cards all appeared during his lifetime.

When automobiles became common, he left the farm to become a mechanic.  During the depression years work was scarce and he went back to looking after the family farm with his youngest brother.  Later in life he had a small mixed farm with several acres of market garden.  He could fix anything mechanical and build anything with wood.

My mother’s father raised a family of fourteen on a dryland farm in southwest Saskatchewan.  He managed to feed them all and did not lose any of them to the diseases and accidents that were so prevalent in those days.  He was blind.

How did they do it?  What kind of thoughts went through their minds when they faced wrenching changes in their lives?  I don’t know.  I do know they were readers of the Bible and had a faith that trusting in God would bring the answers they needed.

Nowadays we expect that technology, psychology and politics will be able to create a brave new world where we will all be happy and fulfilled.  The experiment looks to be pretty much a failure, but we think with just a little more tinkering and tweaking we can make it work.  If we could take a step back and honestly consider things, I think we would find that the root cause of most of the problems that we face here in North America is that people have stopped reading the Bible and trusting in God.

God knows our needs better than we do.  It’s never too late to turn to God for help.  I may think that I first need to clean up this mess I’ve gotten myself into before asking God’s help.  That just delays us from obtaining the help and direction we need.  “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33).  That promise is as real for us today as it was for our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers.