Have you ever sensed life passing so fast that you couldn't keep up with it? Every ten days we have to do laundry, and I constantly say, "I just did laundry yesterday!" Christmas always takes me by surprise.
I turn 75 this summer; yet I'm sure I turned 17 only a few months ago. I heard of someone doing this with their age, so I tried it and was amazed by what I saw. I imagined a tack pinning the end of a string on 1947, the year I was born. Then I extended that string up to 2022 and thought about the world events, social changes, personal growth and technical advancements that happened in that time period.
The first thing I noticed was how close I had come to World War II. My birth came around 670 days after it ended and only a little over 800 days after allied soldiers liberated prisoners from Hitler's death camps. I am not mentioning important history such as the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights Movement. I will stick with simpler things that affected my life.
When I was 12, we shared a "party line" on our home telephone with eight other families. Neighbors often asked me how long I was going to talk to my girlfriend because they needed to use the phone. Our high school teacher introduced electric typewriters, and I complained about such a light key pressure. We actually had to go to a theatre to see a movie. Transportation advanced rapidly over those years, and I never imagined satellites circling the globe or telescopes filming distant galaxies from space.
I remember seeing a computer in the '70s that took up a whole room. We now have more power than that in our cell phones. Futuristic programs predicted the use of phones that did not need to be plugged in, but I don't recall anyone saying we could take pictures, search the web for a restaurant, or watch a movie on our phone. I do remember people saying that we were going to have lots of free time when appliances and computers helped us with our work, but I don't think anyone thought about instant access with instant expectations.
Now let's go back to 1947 and swing the string backwards 75 years to 1872. We pass through two world wars, the beginnings of radio, television, the telephone and electricity. It was not that long ago that people moved by walking, riding horses, riding in animal-led carts, boats and, relatively recently, trains. Automobiles and air travel did not become popular until the early 1900s. (Think of all the thousands of years before this change!)
Some dates that are important to our family include the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and the trial of Chief Standing Bear in 1879. Although I am Indigenous, my great grandfather, Mark, who was born 100 years before me in 1847, was a sergeant in the infamous 7th Cavalry. Mark writes about a Christmas Eve he shared with Captain Benteen; he noted that neither of them liked General Custer.
Mark mustered out of the cavalry before the battle, and he fell in love with a Ponca woman, who became my great grandmother. The Ponca chief, Standing Bear, proved, in his famous trial where he sued the U.S. government, that he was a person and thus deserved to live where he wanted. My great grandparents lived the rest of their lives near the Ponca people in Nebraska.
I often compare a point in my life with the same time in Mark's life. He was wounded in the Civil War in 1865 and had trouble getting to his dying mother because the trains were shut down after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. In 1965 I worked at a soda fountain in a drug store. I had fun dating my husband and going to Prom. What radical changes came one day at a time.
I have no idea what tomorrow holds for any of us, but I do know that we cannot lose if we walk each day with our Lord. Times change quickly, but He is the same yesterday, today and forever.
Sue Carlisle grew up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. An enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, her passion is to encourage people to look at creation and see our awesome Creator. Sue is author of Walking with the Creator Along the Narrow Road (https://www.indianlife.org/product/walking-with-the-creator-along-the-narrow-road/). She and her husband, Wes, now live in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
