Category Archives: Potpourri

Books, movies and miscellaneous

Was 20th Century Prosperity Just a Blip in History?

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I recently read an article in a quilt magazine about Ida Stover Eisenhower, mother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It included several photos of quilts made by the president’s mother from the time she was young.

The quilts were pretty, and representative of their time (late 1800s to early 1900s). But what really interested me was the story of her married life.

She met her future husband, David Eisenhower, at college. After they were married in 1885, David sold the prime Kansas farmland his father had given the couple as a wedding gift, raised an additional $2,000 and started a mercantile store with a friend.

The business did very well for two years, but then local farmers began asking for credit after losing their crops to drought and grasshoppers. Eventually David and his partner had to borrow money to keep the shop afloat, but the store failed anyway.

The Eisenhowers then moved to Texas, where David found a job working for a railroad company as an engine wiper for $40 a week. These were hard years for the Eisenhowers. It was during this time that the future president was born.

After two years in Texas, David was offered a job in a creamery in his hometown, and the family moved back to Kansas and lived with relatives for seven years. Then Eisenhower’s brother, a doctor, sold them a house on a few acres at the edge of town. They would raise six sons in that 818-square-foot house. And Ida and David would live in that little house for the rest of their lives.

~.~

Ok, it’s a bit of history, but what’s so interesting about it? I think it shows that up until the mid-20th century, getting started in life was tough. People had a hard time making it. If it wasn’t drought and grasshoppers, it was financial trouble. But people persevered and got through it.

However, after World War II, our country became unusually prosperous compared to the past. My generation (the tail end of the Baby Boomers) grew up believing that life wouldn’t be so hard. You go to college, get a degree, buy a nice house, drive nice cars, and as long as you show up to work each day, you’ll keep moving up and getting in a better position financially until you retire comfortably like your parents did.

It’s not working out that way in my family. I’m one of four sisters, three of whom are married. Of the three husbands, two have been out of work for some time and one is watching his business shrink. The unmarried sister is the mom of two boys and has been out of work for over a year. The other two sisters work in the public schools and are employed, for now.

And it’s not just our family. One friend’s husband has had his hours cut and faces an uncertain future. Another quit her church preschool teacher job because of something immoral going on in the church; a few weeks later, her husband was laid off. Friends who retired early had to go back into the work force as substitute teachers because their retirement account took a beating.

Up until recently I was thinking something strange was going on, with so many people I know losing their jobs, and unemployment rates across the country skyrocketing. But now I’m wondering if the “something strange” was actually what happened while I was growing up, when for fifty years or so it was so much easier to earn a living than it had been for most of history.

Maybe it was a glitch, a blip, and now we’re going back to normal, like the normal of Ida Stover Eisenhower’s time, when making a living was a struggle, and you were grateful to have an 800-square foot house to raise your six boys in. I wonder….

Random Thoughts While Going Through Our Storage Unit

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I spent a good chunk of last week (Spring Break) going through boxes from our storage unit as we try to pare down our possessions, part of the downsizing exercise we began nearly two years ago when we moved from the five-bedroom house where we raised our kids to a smaller home in another state.

I thought I’d gotten rid of my two big kids’ schoolwork before we moved, but I found more boxes last week, including one full of Peter’s workbooks and notebooks from age 5 on. (Boy, I sure spent a lot on A Beka in the early years of homeschooling!) And I think it’s ok to get rid of all his schoolwork, LOL, seeing how he graduated from college two years ago. I think he proved he knows a few things. But it’s hard letting go of the past. I’m forcing myself to only keep a few notebooks and other papers with his writing.

Even with some of the stuff pitched already, it stunned me to look at all of the books and papers and realize that this was the evidence of what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-some years. We moms are accustomed to having what we produce disappear: folded stacks of laundry and racks of homemade cookies evaporate soon after we produce them. So to see even just a portion of the work we produced over all those years of homeschooling kind of takes my breath away….and makes it that much harder to pitch things. But I was strict with myself, and we overloaded the garbage man last week.

Of course, old schoolwork isn’t all I’m finding in these boxes. I’ve been addicted to newspapers for almost my entire life, and as a result I’m the queen of clippings. Seems like there’s always something interesting in the paper that I need to tear out and save because I might want to read it again sometime. This explains all the clippings stuffed in boxes (along with old magazines I kept meaning to read). Not a good thing years later when you need to go through it all.

I can’t possibly read all of that stuff now, but as I sorted, I kept the articles I just couldn’t resist, and reread them all at night, when I was tired of going through boxes. And I learned something interesting: the articles found in the newspapers and magazines of the 1980s and 1990s are a lot more useful than what you see these days. There were plenty of solid, informational articles, as opposed to the tidal wave of celebrity worship and high-priced decorating ideas seen in recent years. No wonder newspapers are dropping like flies these days.

Book #5: Money, Possessions and Eternity by Randy Alcorn

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From the fifth of five books that have had a major effect on me: Money, Possessions and Eternity by Randy Alcorn (from page 297):

“After feeding the five thousand, Jesus told his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” (John 6:12). If ever waste wasn’t an issue, you would think it would be when the provision was miraculously provided! We should remember Christ’s words, “Let nothing be wasted,” when we look in our refrigerators and garbage cans and garages. Can you imagine the disciples sitting in a small circle and Jesus multiplying the loaves and fish in their midst until they are buried under piles of it while the multitudes go hungry? Unthinkable, isn’t it? God provides excess not so it can be stored up but so it can be distributed to the needy.”

Book #4: Discipline, The Glad Surrender by Elisabeth Elliot

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From the fourth of five books that have had a major effect on me, Discipline, The Glad Surrender by Elisabeth Elliot (from page 37):

“God could have chosen to do everything Himself, but instead He so conceived the world that birds must build nests and sit on eggs, microbes must break down organisms, salmon must struggle upstream to spawn, earthworms must aerate the soil, bees must construct honeycombs, and man must will and work.

It is the willingness we must emphasize here. We pray “Thy will be done as it is in heaven.” God’s will is always willingly and gladly done in heaven. Willing obedience is a very different thing from coercion. A college dean once observed that the happiest students on any campus are the musicians and athletes. “Why?” I asked. “Because they’re disciplined, and they volunteered to be disciplined.” People sitting in required lectures are under discipline, and people sitting in television lounges are “volunteers,” but athletes and musicians put themselves under a coach or director who tells them what to do. They delight to do his will. They are actually having fun.

God does not coerce us to follow Him. He invites us. He wills that we should will—that is, He wills our freedom to decline or accept. If we want to be disciples, we place ourselves, like the football player and the instrumentalist, under someone’s direction. He tells us what to do, and we find our happiness in doing it. We will not find it anywhere else. We will not find it by doing only what we want to do and not doing what we don’t want to do. That is the popular idea of what freedom is, but it does not work. Freedom lies in keeping the rules. Joy is there, too. (If only we could keep the joy in view!)”