Life is a Leveler

What does life is a leveler really mean? The longer you live, the more you realize that the many things that happen to you and your loved ones average out. For every really bad thing that happens to you will be balanced out by great things. Read the article below by Robert Freer to find out what real live experience of his brought this fact home to him and his family. This was truly a defining event – one that you wait for with concern and anticipation if you have a daughter.

By Robert E. Freer, Jr., President of The Free Enterprise Foundation

Life is a leveler. Even for the great, life proceeds as it does for the rest of us, day by day. Their lives like our own consist of routine which in time becomes a rhythm. We are all equal and alike in our mortality, and experience the same aches and joys along life’s journey. We all dream mostly about the people most important to us, those people with whom our involvement provides the meaning for our lives, the mileposts and its measure.

You won’t read this for a couple of weeks, but my family and I have just experienced one of those defining events which gives each of us cause to reflect and catch a glimpse of our life’s meaning. On April 22, my youngest daughter was married to a fine young man here in Charleston.

While feeling joy that two highly principled, loving young adults have found each other and have agreed to face life together, I am keenly aware of the challenges facing today’s families including our own, how temporal and fragile relationships can become when assaulted by the images, speed and complexity of our digital age as well as our own frailties. I could be daunted and afraid for them when considering the forces of discontinuity that will confront them, but I am not. Instead I am strangely comforted by the experience.

The French author Alphonse Karr is reputed to be the source of the famous aphorism, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la mime chose.” (The more things change, the more they remain the same). My comfort comes from that truth. For human beings the successful life is about the values that bind us to our society, and this has been so for at least the last two millennia

In selecting verses to read at their marriage my daughter and her husband, like many before them selected from First Corinthians, Chapter 13, describing the importance and character of love as the core of their relationship with each other.

Writing 2000 years ago, the apostle Paul tells his flock back in Corinth, “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy; it does not boast. It is not proud; it is not rude; it is not self seeking; it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres” Paul ends by reminding the Corinthians “…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love”

Sounds pretty contemporary to me. The whole Book of First Corinthians connects us to our past and is as modern as today. Like our time, theirs was plagued not only by the forces of nature but also by the emptiness of faithless non enduring relationships and the search by men and women alike for comfort and meaning in their attachment. The value to society of The Bible in general and First Corinthians in particular throughout time immemorial is not just its message of our salvation through Christ but its practical, time tested counsel on how to live a satisfying life. It is this practical aspect of ordering of life that made it the favorite reader for our founding fathers.

Paul’s life affirming counsel is as good today as it was then and connects us to our ancestors over a two millennia span of human experience. We can identify with their anxiety, their frailty and their faith. We know innately their resilience and their failures. We are not so different. They endured. We have endured, and our offspring will endure. From my experience, I would say that not only will they endure but thrive and carry mankind to a better outcome than the society we are yielding to them.

We will yield to them sometimes with protest and sometimes willingly, but we will do so a little bit each day. As we became our parents on some distant day in the past, they are becoming us. Whether we are willing to pass quietly into obscurity and then onto our ultimate reward, they are fully ready and capable of taking the baton and carrying us wherever it is that we are headed.

I was particularly conscious of this passage at the rehearsal dinner when after I had given my father-of-the-bride toast, my daughter, my shy, quiet well behaved daughter stepped forward and just took over. She spoke with conviction, poise and assurance, and it seemed to me that she spoke for the first time as a mature adult and wowed everyone. She had transformed before all our eyes into this benign but powerful presence. I couldn’t have been prouder, and I rejoice with the rest of you who have already experienced a similar life affirming experience.

I continue to be concerned about all the national policy subjects I normally write about. Fiscal irresponsibility, taxation insanity, immigration reform, the war in Iraq, apathy among too many of our citizens, and the everyday assaults on the values about which I write will all return to these pages soon, but today, just today let me share with each of you the hopeful message that all is well. Despite the challenges thrown our way, America and its people will survive and prevail. Our youngsters are more than our equals, and they will find the way.

Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

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