As I write this I am sitting next to a fire in what, a century ago, was a corn crib. My grandfather’s brother lived in a house that sat 75 yards east until 1946 when it burned leaving only the crib standing. Since then the old crib has functioned primarily as a getaway for boys of different ages or for the occasional hunter that needed temporary shelter from the cold. I have walked by this old cabin (as it is now called) countless times in my life. As I changed from a boy to a teenager to a man it has meant different things to me. As a boy, it was a mysterious place where I dared not linger very long. I would open the door and look at the old bed springs whose wires had largely rusted in two and almost feel the former owner looking down at me from another realm. If I wandered by hunting at night I would walk a wide circle around it because of the creepiness of the place as it sat silhouetted against the night sky. As a teenager I outgrew those childlike thoughts and treated the cabin much like a novelty. Only once do I remember stopping here in my teens. A friend of mine and I did so as we were squirrel hunting. We sat, ate our viennas, and moved on after carving our names in the rickety door.

Nowadays, I have the privilege of watching my own children build fires, laugh, play, and do all the things kids are supposed to do while in and around it. As a middle aged adult the old corn crib has taken on a new significance. Since I was a child and teen I have lived away from my little hometown and have seen, just in last the twenty years, cataclysmic changes in our culture. Living in a big city you see another side of human-kind catalyzed by over one million people living so close together. Even outside of the writhing masses of humanity of the large urban areas the change is still agonizingly evident. No longer is there a societal structure on which we can depend to reinforce what is taught in the sanctity of our homes. We have arrived at a time, even in our small towns, when everything of moral significance has been redefined or whose definition has been eviscerated altogether. The words love, marriage, church, family, male, female, human, and even life have all been either changed or hollowed out to the point that they are now bereft or any true cultural meaning whatsoever.

Many of these changes have happened in my lifetime, indeed some in the past few years. A few have been coming at us like a slow cultural tidal wave for well over a century, slowly building size and destructive power while those who would be affected most went on about their lives totally unaware of the societal upheaval that was slowly but surely headed their way.
Through the generations this old cabin has remained unchanged however. Three quarters of a century ago, what surrounded it was a barren hillside. It’s now encompassed by woods with mature trees however the logs making up its aging structure have stood the test of time. As a 45 year old man I now look at the marks made by a double bitted axe so long ago and I wonder what that man would say regarding our moral abdication if he were here now. Are we like those logs? Are we to serve the purpose of hearkening back to a simpler time all the while sliding, most assuredly, into the pit of functional and moral obsolescence? My friend’s and my initials still testify of what once was as they sit statically carved on an old wood door with rusty hinges and silently watch time pass by with no thought of either testimony or caution.
Christians are not called to operate with a mindset of such indifference, but indeed have acted just that way for most of the last century. We, as a people, supposedly called for a higher and more noble purpose have been assuaged by taking solace in our self-proclaimed significance while we watch tidily from our zones of safety as the world burns down around us while begging for the solution that only we can offer them. This paradigm is worlds away from any semblance of Biblical philosophy and its outcropping can be seen with devastating clarity.
It is most certainly true that time is swiftly running out to right this ship. If this current generation of youngsters is not awakened in order to correct this monumental conundrum we will be beyond the point of no return and will slide ever more swiftly into Slough of Despond that Bunyan once described. Are we up to this task? Will we meet the challenge head on or will we continue to indolently gaze at our own metaphorical yet obsolete log cabins and repeat over and over, “my grandfather’s brother used to live here”?