What are we to do over Chrissie Hynde’s distress over the fact that her city was gone? And back when I was a kid, there was a singer named Joe South, who had a similar song — “Don’t it make you want to go home?” “There’s a six-lane highway down by the creek where I went skinny-dippin’ as a child . . . Now the grass don’t grow and the rivers don’t flow like they did in our childhood days.”
What are Christians supposed to think about the fact that WalMart (say) can completely alter the way of life found in a sleepy little town in the Midwest (say)? As we attempt to answer this question, we find both the agrarian hope and the agrarian lure — the former good, the latter bad. The hope has to do with the time when all things are made new, and we no longer have to deal with good things slipping through our fingers. When the Lord removes all tears (Rev. 21:4), that will include the bittersweet tears.
But the lure has to do with the idolatrous desire to freeze everything right where it was fifty years ago — it is the same temptation we face when we wish (if only for a moment) that an adorable two-year-old could be two forever. But of course, if that wish were granted, it would be a tragedy and not a wonderful blessing at all. Growing up is a mess, but that process is better than bronzed infantilism. Growing up is a mess, and the only thing worse would be not growing up.
So WalMart doesn’t annihilate a small town way of life in Iowa any more than 16th century London eliminated the 13th century way of life in that same spot. In other words, things are altered quite a bit — but the other aspect of this can be filed under “welcome to earth, kid.” “Ways of life” are always being altered whenever one generation has to make way for the next one, which is to say, all the time. When God told us to be fruitful and replenish the earth, He did not mean that we were to trash it. But old things can slip away when things change — and not just when they are trashed. Sex and culture means that sex transforms culture — because sex means that the next generation shows up. And they have to live somewhere.
There is a deep temptation here. The desire for a static “forever” place is one that we can use to resist what God has in store for us. In the purposes and plans of God, no good thing is ever finally and completely lost. But having affirmed this, we have to recognize that nostalgia is not an eschatology.