A Message of Hope

I’m slowly reading Interwoven:  A Pioneer Chronicle by Sallie Reynolds Matthews.  This amazing book was originally published in 1936 and records Mrs. Matthew’s memories of growing up on a ranch near Ft. Griffin, Texas.

For the nation’s centennial celebrations in 1876, the family traveled to the new, nearby town of Albany to celebrate Independence Day.  Writing almost sixty years after that event, Mrs. Matthews recalls how much the world had changed.

The next day we went to the Matthews ranch [remember, she was still a Reynolds at this point–abp] where Bennie and I spent the night and drove on home from there.  We always seemed to have plenty of leisure time in those days; boys and girls would visit and spend several days at the two homes.  There never was any great hurry to be going.  Now we have every convenience to make housekeeping easy and light, running water, both hot and cold, gas and electricity, telephones with which to order everything delivered to our doors, automobiles with paved roads to run them over and if we are in a great hurry we can take an airplane, yet we have so little time for visiting.  We rush, rush, rush here and rush there, and I do not see that we accomplish an extraordinary amount.  Do not think for a minute that I am one who thinks the old times are best for I do not.  I think we are living in the “Golden Age” but I do wonder where the time goes; it flies faster than a weaver’s shuttle. (p. 118, emphasis added)

Written between the two great wars, Matthew’s ideas of a “Golden Age” were common to her time.  Few of us today have such a view of our own times.  So we yearn even more deeply for the relationships of “the old times,” yet we adopt lifestyles that make time for long, casual visits almost impossible.

As believers, we know that the “Golden Age” is yet to come–an age when there will be no more “rush, rush, rush,” for time shall be no more.  It will not be our accomplishments, but our relationships, that matter.  Because we know our future, should that not help us set our priorities for the present?  Let us allow that vision to shape our lives now!