Healing Generational Gaps With a Drill and Hammer

“You kids make me excited for the world again” 

Words from an elderly volunteer that have stuck with me for the past week. These past two weeks we’ve had the the incredible opportunity to volunteer with Samaritan’s Purse doing hurricane relief in southern Alabama. All 40 of us loud, progressive and might I say, a tad obnoxious young adults poured into an old southern Baptist church in Foley, Alabama as our home for the next two weeks. However, we were sharing this space with about another 40 volunteers, all retired and of older age, grey hair and southern accents. 

We looked at our new roommates with a little bit of apprehension and curiosity to see how these next few weeks would go. The separation between old and young, progressive and traditional, generation to generation seemed daunting and irreparable. 

As we sat down for our first meal together, the apprehension of relationship was mutual and all of our preconceived stereotypes for each other were easy to divide us. 

It’s funny how we can learn and preach so much about Jesus’s understanding and love for everyone, but when it’s someone who we don’t see eye to eye with, that truth is deterioated. 

Nonetheless, we came into the weeks with open hearts to love our older friends and learn from them the best we could. 

I hate to skip to the “good part of the story” but that is truly how fast our apprehension completely diminished in a community that loved Jesus like that. 

I was humbled and struck in the most beautiful way. For some reason I had thought that our elderly friends didn’t know the same Jesus I knew. That they didn’t truly understand the truths of forgiveness, mercy, love and acceptance that “progressive christianity” advertised. That our differences of political ideologies, modern perspectives, and where we grew up somehow meant that the character of the God we worshipped was different. 

I found myself convicted. Convicted of my disbelief that my God is bigger than any difference, convicted of my disbelief of people’s interpretation of his word being accurate, convicted that I, as well as a majority of our society, allows generational gaps of understanding to flaw the body of Christ. 

I found myself in the hands of Polly and Gary, our sweet couple that were our team leads, who treated us like their daughters, loving us like their own but also trusting us with serious tasks, teaching us with grace, forgiveness and patience. 

I found myself in the small kitchen of this church, almost on the floor because I was laughing so hard with Kathy and Kim, the cooks who became my best friends in two weeks. 

I found myself dancing to old southern hymns that one of the preachers were sharing with us during breakfast, breaking out his harmonica, filling the room with chapping and smiles from young too old. 

And we weren’t the only ones who had generational stereotypes to be dismantled. One early morning when some friends and I were in the kitchen, helping Kim and Kathy with making breakfast, Kim pulled my friends JP and Esther aside and started to weep. 

She explained that she hadn’t realized how much JP reminded her of her late son, who was lost to suicide when he was about JP’s age. She became emotional because of how kind and hardworking JP was and the relationship they had built, bringing some healing and redemption to the grief that she had felt loosing her son.

I was struck with the gravity of these generational gaps that have become such a normality, an issue that is deemed as unessential. There is a shocking lack of striving for understanding between generational gaps. 

Knowing that our elderly friends have the same desires of being seen, understood and loved, knowing that hardships of loss, rejection and heartbreak stretch across the ages brings an understanding of unity and community.

Jesus humbled my heart that week, giving the simple truth that we are all his children into a whole new depth of understanding. I am forever grateful that Jesus opened my eyes and softened my heart to the diversity of his kingdom and his incredible intentionality of that. 

Thanks God for turning drilling and hammering into multigenerational love and understanding.

Kim, our sweet cook, and I being silly together.