I’m Dated (and you are, too)

New Year’s Day, 2025. The day we all start having to pause to remember what year to write on forms and checks and such, or when we start writing it wrong and having to scribble it out and start again. What will this New Year bring? No one really knows. Looking back is easier—we know what the past is. For good or bad, it’s done. Before long, this past year that was so current, so vital and cutting-edge yesterday will start to feel stale and dated. Old. Has been. Whether we look back on it as the good old days or some kind of personal dark age doesn’t change the fact that we will look back on it. There was a New Year’s Day last year, too. Do you remember it? Or ten years ago, or twenty? Last Halloween I saw that they were selling ’90’s costumes, as if the ’90’s weren’t just last week. But they did look a bit funny.

L.P. Hartley once wrote that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. As I look back over the past I’ve known in my own short lifetime, I can already see that he’s right. The American culture I grew up in has already changed, almost beyond recognition. The Ireland I moved to 16 years ago is not the same Ireland I live in now. Looking back beyond my own lifetime the change is even more dramatic—our ancestors may be our own flesh and blood, but their ways of living and thinking still seem strange and foreign from today’s vantage point. All this being so, have you ever paused to consider that our descendants will feel the exact same way about us and our current cultural moment? The past may feel dated to us, more and more so the further we go from it, but isn’t today also a date? So we are dated, too. Today the world feels normal, but that won’t last—those who come behind us will have a hard time understanding the way we do things and the beliefs and assumptions that we easily take for granted. If the past is any indicator, then we can be sure that the fashionable ideas of today are mostly just that—fashions. They will eventually go out of style and be replaced, just as surely as 2026 will replace 2025 on our forms and checks. 

It’s easy to look back and see how the lies of the past influenced our ancestors. It’s much harder to see how the lies of today are influencing us—but it’s very important that we try. I am dated. You are, too. We are men and women of our time, whether we want to be or not. It is impossible to live in the river of humanity without being influenced by the powerful currents of living and thinking that surround us, for good or for bad. But if we admit this, and if we are willing to identify and challenge our own assumptions, then we’ll be in a much better position to assess our own datedness more objectively and seek to live our lives from a foundation of truth that is timeless, rather than simply letting ourselves be carried along by whatever ideas happen to be popular at this particular moment. The best way I’ve found to do that is to throw my anchor down every day in God’s word—to soak my soul in his unchanging reality and revelation and pray for his help to apply it to the day I find myself in. If you aren’t in the habit of doing that, I encourage you to make it a New Year’s resolution. Another great help is to listen carefully to people who have lived in other times, as C.S. Lewis encouraged us to do: 

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” ― C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius’ “On the Incarnation”.

Today is the day we live in. We can’t stop being dated. But if we are careful and humble and thoughtful, we can bring the wisdom of the ages and the fundamental truths of God and reality to bear on this one precious, never-to-be-repeated day that we find ourselves in. The more we do that the better today will be—and every day that follows.