I recently heard myself saying to friends, “I wish I lived when my grandparents lived; they didn’t have the problems we have now.” As I walked away from the couple to whom I was speaking, I realized the foolishness of that statement.
My grandpa, who was born in 1898, was three months old when the United States declared war on Spain. Grandpa was one year old, when the First Philippine Republic declared war on the United States. On September 14, 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated. Grandpa was three years old.
Grandpa enlisted in the Army and fought in World War I. He was nineteen years old.
“The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans” (https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic). Grandpa was in his early twenties.
In 1925, only half of all homes in the U.S. had electric power.
Grandpa had just celebrated his thirty-first birthday when the Great Depression began. The worldwide devastation lasted for ten years. “When the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed” (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/great-depression-history).
In 1940, nearly half of all homes didn’t have hot piped water, a bathtub, or a flush toilet.
A few years after Grandpa’s fortieth birthday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The United States became fully engaged in the Second World War. And then there was the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas. Grandpa was sixty-four. On April 4, 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. On June 6, the same year, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, California.
These are merely a taste of the struggles and troubles of my grandparent’s generation. After considering these few, I will never again say I wish I lived then, instead of now. But rather, I’ll remember that each generation has its own problems.
I’ll remember Queen Esther from the Bible. In the face of great adversity, she and her older cousin Mordecai contemplated the possibility that God had brought them to their positions “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). And indeed He did.
I’ll heed King Solomon’s warning, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10).
The trials of this life can be pretty disheartening, until we put our trust in Jesus’ who said: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
