Sometimes the stories from yesteryear reveal more truth than a thousand platitudes we preach. And most often it happens in the routine, mundane circumstances of life.
Maybe that’s why Scripture admonishes us to use those very moments to pass along God’s truth: “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).
Notice the settings — sitting at home, walking together, lying down at night, rising in the morning: all rather mundane routines of life.
I’ll add one more: driving in the car, listening to country music.
That’s what my thirteen-year-old grandson, Eli, and I were doing recently. I’m not a country music fan, but he is. And maybe because it’s a classic, Eli pulled up his playlist and played Cody Johnson’s rendition of “Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Ol’ Days).” It’s a song about a grandson asking his grandfather to tell him about simpler times — days when, among other things, “the line between right and wrong didn’t seem so hazy.”
I thought about responding to that line — about how it seems everyone lives by “my truth,” whatever they determine that to be, how today feels like the fulfillment of that dark era in biblical history recorded in Judges, when everyone “did what was right in their own eyes.” But I didn’t go there.
Instead, after we’d listened to Cody sing it through a couple of times, I talked about the good ol’ days — what life was like in an era when, at least in our home, God’s truth was our moral compass, directing our lives, even if imperfectly. Surprisingly, I had Eli’s full attention.
I told him about growing up in Altus, Oklahoma — how we could ride our bikes home from school and all over town on Saturdays without a worry; how my dad would come home from work and Mom would have dinner on the table for four famished boys; how on Sundays we went to church for both morning and evening services, and on Wednesdays for kids’ choir practice, a fellowship meal, and prayer and Bible study. I told him how we’d rush home on Sunday nights after church to watch Bonanza on our old box television while we popped popcorn. I told him about catching movies at the downtown theater, playing ball in the neighborhood, and riding over to Ragsdale’s Bakery for a cream horn.
I gave him a glimpse of life in the good ol’ days — my life, when I was right about his age.
And then, somewhere down the road, Eli chimed in: “Let me tell you what I do on school days and Saturdays.” And so we shared. We talked. We listened.
Sometimes, as we walk along life’s paths, it’s right and good to teach God’s truth and His Word to our children. And sometimes it’s equally right and good simply to tell them what living that life has looked like — to share what the good ol’ days were like fifty-five years ago for a grandfather who was once thirteen himself. But perhaps the greatest gift of all is what comes next: the chance for those of us who are older to listen — really listen — to what a child is living now, what they are experiencing, who they are becoming.
And hopefully, these unhurried moments with parents and grandparents, in the car or around the table or walking down the road, will themselves become the good ol’ days — not someday, but now. For we serve not a God of yesterday alone, but the God of the ever-present Now, who redeems the ordinary and makes every day, if we have eyes to see it, a good ol’ day.