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I love old people, I am on the cusp of becoming an “old people” myself and it is a great privilege. A sweet friend shared with me, “it’s better to be over the hill than under the hill.” Made me laugh! In truth however, “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord,” so I try not to feel too sad about those who have taken cuts in line and gone onto the next adventure without me.

Anyway, to the heart of the matter, it sure seems as if what is wrong with our culture is that we have too many elders who have not let go of power and handed down the torch. Certainly President Biden can barely form a coherent sentence, but several people in congress are way past the age of retirement and actually being wheeled in to vote by their caregivers.

Some of those “rich men North of Richmond” have been in politics for over 60 years! It’s darkly comical how they somehow manage to win re-election by promising to fix all the problems from the last administration. Apparently no one realizes they were the last administration!

Never mind politics, much of the church is in a similar situation. I once visited a church and a dear friend of mine quipped, “I’m sorry, we just don’t have much of a youth group here.” It was a flattering and funny because I have grandchildren! No so funny was how every sermon was about, “what is wrong with young people these days.” I kid you not I sat in the front row and the pastor looked me right in the eyes every time he said it.

I have some older friends, older pastors and I have no desire to put them out to pasture, in fact I am quite fond of them. It is just that they are all speaking about how “young people in American have squandered the inheritance we left you,” and I just cannot communicate with them, I cannot relate to them, I cannot convey the truth to them in a way they will understand.

Like, my dude, I simply inherited a broken world, a world of divorce, sexual abuse, consumerism, addiction, low wages, and outrageous housing prices. I also inherited four elderly parents I was somehow supposed to care for, but that’s a whole other tale.

I have never been a part of your world. I have no idea what that even looked like! I have always been on the outside looking in. My alleged “inheritance” has never been the ball of sunshine and light you seem to believe it is.

I see a lot of young people not allowed to grow up, trapped in their parent’s basement, held hostage by a system that makes survival very challenging. Here where I live if you work full time, you might be able to afford a room in someone’s house. At best. Finances are significant, but there is also just this general attitude of not wanting to share power with young people and actually creating and desiring their dependency.

I have listened to some sermons about the Prodigal Son in congregations where every darn person was estranged from their grown children and a good chunk of them were divorced too, and not one single soul saw a problem with their own selves. Nope I kid you not, the takeaway was that those kids are the problem and they deserve to just wallow with the pigs for all of eternity. I didn’t last long there, I began to dream about pigs and pretty soon I began to rationalize that pigs are probably far better company than most people anyway…..

Sigh. I don’t know how to fix it. I am conscious as a mom, as a mother in law, as a grandma, of that need to let go of power, to relinquish some control so the now grown ups can be the grown ups they were designed to be. It can be painful and challenging, but if you don’t pass the torch you create dysfunction and chaos.

Our children, all children down through the ages, were designed for such a time as this. We were not. They have to be given a seat at the table, empowered and given opportunity to fix their own broken world.