THE DAY OF REST - Chapter One

The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time

— An online book about rest and worship—
By Dr. Al Franzmeier

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Chapter One - How The World Has Changed

Something called modernism flourished from the end of the nineteenth century to end of the World War II. It was an exciting time. Writers, teachers, philosophers, theologians and politicians proclaimed old ways at an end as new, modern, progressive ways opened up. The industrial, mechanized age was here to stay and it was good. Quantum and relativistic physics, analytical philosophy and the new number theory in mathematics appeared on the scene. Little did we realize at the time what implications were embedded in those breakthroughs. As the twentieth century progressed many thinkers rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions. Immutable laws no longer govern historical events, they insisted. Traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life became outdated. Modern industry changed our economics as well as the social and political aspects of our lives.

I draw on the experiences of my birth family to illustrate. We lived on a farm of about two hundred acres in the southern part of Minnesota. My father had inherited the farm when Grandpa died. Grandma continued to live with us until her nineties when she moved into a nursing home where she lived on to the ripe old age of one hundred one.

My uncles, aunts and other relatives lived on farms all around. In my early youth we used a team of workhorses to plow and plant the fields and harvest the hay, but then we got our first tractor. Eventually we sold off the horses.  We were traditional, old school type people, but times were changing. Our farms were becoming mechanized. These were modern times—also for farmers. Each spring Grandma and Mother planted a huge garden from which they harvested all of our vegetables for eating and canning. They watched over a flock of three hundred chickens and roosters that provided us with eggs and meat—and with a weekly mess to clean up, my job as a boy.

Farm life was like that. Everybody, including we children, had chores. We grew most of our food and took care of ourselves. When necessary, we bought staples like flour and salt from a local store. Since we were a dairy farm, we always had plenty of milk, butter and cheese, processed by a local co-op. But in the thirties we started milking our cows with machines and lighting our barn with electricity. These were modern times.

Telephones were very primitive in those days. Our family’s first was installed in my grandparents’ house. One turned a crank on the side of a wooden box to reach another party. A bell rang and sent a signal alerting the operator to connect us. We didn’t necessarily need her since each family on the party line was already assigned a unique ring. Our ring was three short bells and a long. To reach our neighbor we could simply pick up the earpiece, ring their signal and, when they answered, start talking. That also meant that any or all of us on the line could listen or join in the conversation as well. We were one big neighborhood, tied together by the magic of the telephone. These were modern times.

We also had radios. Mother had a small maroon, plastic one on top of the refrigerator in our kitchen. She won it at a raffle at the general store down the road. She loved to listen to soap operas, country music and news on her radio. I vividly recall how we clustered around Mother’s radio to hear reports of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that infamous first week in December, 1941.  The next week President Roosevelt shocked our nation by announcing over the same radio that we were at war with both Japan and Germany. The marvel of modern communications brought us immediate, but frightening news from the other side of the world. These were modern times.

The war changed our little rural community—as well as to our nation. A few years into that it the federal government began to build a munitions plant on hundreds of acres of former farmland adjoining the western boundaries of our farm. The Federal Government’s Department of Defense confiscated the land from families we all knew. Day after day we watched the plant’s huge smoke stacks go up. Farmers who formerly lived there were paid for their houses, barns and acreage, but had to find new farms or new ways of making a living. Some went to work in the plant. These were modern times.

In the tiny entryway of our country church we hung banners with stars representing our young men in the armed forces. A couple years into it, the war became personal. My cousin Godon, an air force bombardier, was killed in a raid over Germany when his B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was shot down. Gordon was about ten years older than I. I hardly knew him. My Aunt Grace never quite recovered from his death. He was her only child and she took it very hard. Our parents warned us children not to talk about Gordon in Aunt Grace’s presence. In World War II our nation lost over 175,000 soldiers and sailors with over 450,000 casualties. These were modern times.

When World War II ended, we could not go back to the way things were before. World War II was a defining moment for our community and in our nation’s history. The rural, agricultural way of life I knew as a child began to wan. The urbanizing, industrial age changed it all. Modern times were becoming postmodern.

After the war the world of technology moved in and the pace of life quickened.  Jet airplanes began to fly overhead. Black and white TV became a big hit. The Beatles and Elvis shook up the establishment with their wild music. The whole world began to rock and roll, but not only to the new music.  Sounds of change were everywhere. Month after month hundreds of changes dropped into our lives. Things were changing so fast we lost count. It was exciting and scary all at the same time. Modernism was ending. Postmodernism was beginning.

The postmodern bureaucratic, technological society

The burgeoning postmodern technology changed how and where we lived. Life on the family farm slipped away as big corporate farms sprang up, cultivating thousands of acres, milking hundreds of cows and feeding hundreds of pigs and beef cattle. My mother used to send me out to the chicken coop to collect a dozen eggs from our half-dozen hen nests. On these corporate farms chickens were now raised in air-conditioned barns by the thousands. Eggs, wings, legs and thighs were now processed, packaged and forwarded to supermarkets around the nation. Postmodern times brought relentless change.

Advances in communication technology were a large part of the change. Today we call our friends and relatives in New York, Wisconsin, south Texas or Idaho easier than we used to call neighbors on our party line a mile down the road. We make phone calls over the Internet, using VOIP (voice-over-Internet-provider) technology. Cell phones are ubiquitous, used not only for conversations, but also to access the Internet, monitor our schedules, send text messages and manage photo images.

I write these words on a computer. I do my banking and most of my correspondence on a computer. We can no longer function without computers. As a consequence, we’ve had to learn a new set of abbreviations like RUP, CD, DSL, DVD, HDTV, ISP, HTML and hundreds more. We’re supposed to know about power conditioners, broadband access, bitmapped images, cookies, dithering, compact flash drives, shock ratings, firewall flaming, page hosting, hypertext, ISA buses, wiki, JavaScript, log-in name, Lotus notes, boot sequences, RSS feeds, WiFi and spanning tree protocols. These are postmodern times.

In this new, postmodern world, information and data are big business, making twenty-five year olds into billionaires. We are both empowered and engulfed by information and information technologies. A while back I bought a nostalgic CD recording of Judy Garland’s hits from the 1930’s and 40’s, called ‘Over the Rainbow,’ from a store in London I found on eBay, the great online trading place. I paid for it on a secure site with my MasterCard. The CD arrived at my doorstep ten days later by United Parcel.

There’s nothing strange about that. We do it all the time. Yet who even buys CDs anymore? The music industry is scared. Now we download music directly from the Internet. These are postmodern times.

Needless to say, computers and the Internet have had a profound effect upon postmodern life, but the changes are not at an end. In ten years we’ll wonder how we ever got along with today’s primitive equipment. Some suggest that in a generation artificially intelligent computers will merge with humans to form a new species. Already we have moved beyond what a single computer can do, regardless of its size. Multiple independent computing clusters act over the Internet as a grid composed of resource nodes, located within many administrative domains. Thus the power of computing is increased manifold.

Who can adjust to the exponential rate of change in twenty-first century life? Who can even track it? Many in my generation no longer try. For several I know, even learning to operate computers is too challenging. On the other hand, our grandchildren grow up playing on and working with computers from their earliest years, to say nothing of cell phones, I-Pods, X-Boxes and who knows what else.  It’s all a part of our ever-changing lives.

Oh, excuse me. My cell phone is ringing. I see also on my phone’s readout that my son is calling from Denmark. He’s over there on business for his globally based company. I had better answer him. I also see I have a couple text messages. Interesting. My wife expects me for dinner in ten minutes. Here’s another note reminding me of an appointment with my dentist tomorrow morning.

We can pick up this conversation later when I post the second chapter.