I rarely watch TV. I don't have cable or an antenna. All I have is a streaming service that comes through my internet. Lots of old movies and old television shows. I have no desire to see the liberal news cycles and college and pro sports just turn me away. But I will watch an old movie (particularly 1950s science fiction) or an old television show. And so it was that I settled in to watch a black and white movie the other night. A low budget movie made in 1962, just before the sexual revolution and the British invasion and the drug culture settled in. 

        The plot of the movie is not really important. Set in 1962 and shot in Los Angles, it was predictable in a lot of ways. However, the real reason I watched it was because of the window back in time the movie gave.

        There was the mother and father and the son and the daughter. Frankie Avalon played the teen-aged son, even though he was in his 20s in real life. Not one of his most memorable rolls. The family is going on a camping trip. They have loaded up the camper, which is going to be pulled by a Mercury Monterey, a rather small car for the time, but with an engine bigger than most pick-ups boast now and with more horsepower. As they are loading up, Mom is wearing a skirt (below the knee) and a nice tucked in top, and the daughter is wearing a pretty dress (with a daring hemline that came all the way to the middle of the knee). The son was wearing jeans, but they had a crease, and a bomber jacket. But Dad was the one who caught my eye. He is practicing casting in the front yard while waiting for the family. He is wearing a sports coat (with no tie), slacks and a neat little businessman's cap. Later, along the way, they causally stopped at a hardware store and purchased ammunition for their two rifles and two shotguns they had in the camper and Dad picked up a handgun. And, of course, everyone is smoking.

        A young person today would laugh at the clothes (and really, Dad did look stupid) and be appalled at the guns and the smoking, but it was common back then. In one scene, the daughter was raped, but you didn't see any of that and they didn't actually say the word 'rape' afterward. And when they sat down to eat, Dad prayed over the meal. 

        As unreal as that might seem today, it was also unreal for people in 1962. Maybe not in California, but certainly in the rest of the country. My father would have made fun of a fisherman in the nifty businessman's hat and he would never have worn a sports coat to fish in. He had one suit he had bought the year before I was born, and we buried him in it fifty years later. It didn't smell of fish, either. When we went fishing, we took the old farm truck, which was nothing like the sleek trucks of today. And our engines of that time displaced in inches, not liters. The only time I saw my mother and sisters in skirts and dresses was if they went to church on Sunday or, in my sisters' cases, to school. The only thing from what I remember from 1962 that was like the movie was that everyone smoked.

        People are different wherever they live and everything is different now than it was sixty one years ago. In California they now would not have had the guns or be able to buy ammunition or a handgun. Clothing would be different now as well as how they interacted with one another. Everything is so different. Except......

        There are still Dads who pray before the meal and at other times. I know it was just a movie, but the same God he was praying to in 1962 is the same God I pray to every morning. We approach the Almighty in the same manner.

        I don't really like devotionals because they tend to take two or three verses and then tell you what you should get from those verses. So I want you to read all of the fourth chapter of Ephesians. Pay particular attention to verses thirteen and fourteen, but read the whole thing. In verse fourteen it urges us to not be pushed around by every wind and doctrine that comes along. Be strong in your faith. Everything around you might change, but the Word of God is eternal