Old Posters & Guiding Principles

Dateline: 15 August 2013

(click to see an enlarged view)

.
For Father's Day last, my sister gave me the poster pictured above. She had taken it off the wall in my parent's house (where she currently lives). I reckon I must have stuck that poster to the dark paneling in the kitchen back around 1975, when I was 17 years old. It hadn't moved from that spot for the last 38 years.

The old poster got me to thinking about wall posters in general, and my younger days. Back in the 1970s it was a popular thing for kids to put posters on their bedroom walls. Some kids had sports posters, some had rock music posters, some had  movie posters, but I don't ever remember buying posters like that. Fact is, I only remember  buying two posters. The one above, and this one...

That crudely-framed poster was in my bedroom when I was a kid, and I tacked it up on the wall of my workshop awhile back.

As I thought about my two old posters, and how they have survived the years, it occurred to me that I've always been something of a counter cultural oddball.

Instead of plugging 100% into popular culture, I eschewed a great deal of it; I embraced lifestyle themes (living simply and working hard) instead of the usual pop icons. And those themes guided me when I was a young man, right up to today.

Though I now realize better than I did back then that the future belongs to God and his sovereign providence (regardless of how hard I may work), the concept of working hard is, of course, biblical (six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work).

What the years have taught me is that there is a difference between working hard to provide for basic needs, and striving hard in the worldly culture to achieve financial success. That striving thing was a total disaster for me.

So I guess I'm older and wiser now, and I'm also more thankful than ever in my life. I'm thankful that, for reasons I can't fully comprehend, I latched onto some fundamental guiding ideals in my youth that have served me well. If I had the chance to do it again, I would not hesitate to embrace those same ideals.