My grandfather was born in 1866, a mere three months after the end of the Civil War; long before the first light bulb or automobile. The telephone wouldn’t make its appearance for ten more years. And he carried a simple slate to school in the one-room schoolhouse in rural Maine.

That slate sits in my dining room, reminding me how much can change in only two generations.

My grandfather lived for 101 years. In that time he went from living by lamplight to seeing the first pictures of Mars beamed back by the satellite Mariner 4 in 1965.

He flew all the way across the country to meet me when I was born, at the age of 95. He marveled at the experience, a man born in the time of horse and buggy. He was already 37 years old when the Wright Brothers had their first successful flight on a beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

I have no memory of him, yet his legacy lived large through my father, whose recollections of his Maine boyhood held a special place in our home, creating in my sister and I an attachment to a place rarely visited and often wondered about.

Did my grandfather perceive how fast the world was changing when he first saw a telephone? When he first heard a radio? He was well into adulthood by that time, building sturdy Maine homes with simple hand tools, living in a house passed down from his ancestors in a small village by the sea.

It all sounds so quaint to my ears. Yet I, too, have seen a vast change in technology in the last 63 years. What, I wonder, will be the stories of the next generation? The one after that? Our grandparents’ history sounds so interesting, yet it was as ordinary to them as ours is to us. I was a teenager when calculators came into common use. Now I carry access to the entire world in my back pocket.

The rush and press of innovation used to be heady and exciting. How long, we wondered, until we had flying cars? Now we are staring down AI and wondering how much of our humanity may be replaced as it reaches ever more deeply into our lives.

We may long for the peace of days bordered by the sun’s light, when a simple slate replaced the tablets and laptops on our children’s school desks. But those days were also marked by death and disease, by wars and hunger. There is no ideal to return to in any generation, except in our imaginations.

In a world where truth is no longer verifiable, and information is manipulated to sell and sway, where do we find footing that won’t crumble beneath us?

Ah, yes. The Bible, filled with truth and wisdom that we can sink our teeth into. Truth that has lasted through centuries of humanity’s attempts to twist, deny, and excuse it away. Wisdom that holds up under pressure; that holds us up under grief and fear, confusion and despair.

My grandfather’s slate is cracked now, useless for its intended purpose. But it reminds me how much can change in so short a time, and how much the things that really matter, remain the same.

His oath, His covenant, His blood
Support me in the whelming flood
When all around my soul gives way
He then is all my hope and stay

On Christ the solid rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand

(Edward Mote)