Idle worship #1

Hey, this is kind of fun - I'm almost exactly the same age as Tim Challies, give or take a few days. Yep, I thought he was older than 29, too. That's largely because, being 29 myself and something of an under-achiever, I always think that people who have achieved things must be older than me.

That's not to say I haven't done a lot of stuff and been a lot of people - no doubt more snippets of my varied testimony will slip out in the coming months - it's just I don't really feel I've got anything solid to show for all that. I can't design tip-top fab websites, and as much as I can hold a sentence together, I've never sat down and written that novel. I have a family - and they are my most precious earthly possession - but I don't really feel I've achieved them, they've been given to me.

I think this lack is largely due to the fact that I have no ingrained sense of discipline and duty. As I grew up, I wasn't so much indulged as allowed to be indolent. If I had a cold, I whinged the day off. If I had a homework deadline, I feigned illness and did the work badly on my day off. I relied at school on my bare-level intelligence and flair for english to get by. I'm just lazy, and I was allowed to be. Quitting comes pretty easy in our culture.

Now, this is not a dog-pile on my parents. They did the best with what they had, and a lot better than some. But I find even the difference between myself and my husband's generation quite startling. My husband is the tail end of the generation that understood duty and 'the protestant work-ethic', whereas I can only remember a few kids in my school year that were vastly different to the half-baked way I behaved.

And now it's expected.

You buck authority, you show how bored you are with everything, you pour out scorn like water. Being a victim is everybody's birthright.




A few days ago, the Dyspraxic Fundamentalist posted about National Service. I thought I disagreed at first - National Service seems like a jolly good antidote for the attitude I've just described.
But I've had a rethink. I actually applied to join the Navy when I was 18. I failed the first medical, but, as usual, I hadn't really been preparing or training or doing anything except imagine myself in uniform. If it had been a compulsory year or two of service, I don't see that my attitude would have changed at all. In fact, the anti-authority bit may well have been amplified.

The issue is deeper than what we can 'make' young people do. As with all things, I do believe that there is a biblical answer, but the application of it is not a top-down thing, it's a grass-roots thing. It involves a sea-change in the thinking of Christians, and that's a tall order...