When I was a kid, a lot of my toys were built from scratch. For raw materials I would go to the garbage bin at the food market and retrieve wooden fruit crates. Once I broke them down, I could use the boards to make a stick horse, or better yet, a scooter! Yes! just take a roller skate, you know, the kind you clamp on to your shoe…oops, they don’t clamp on to shoes any more…oh well, they used to. Anyway, you could take the skate apart in the middle and nail the halves to each end of a short board. Then you take a fruit crate and nail it to the top of the board, and then you get a skinny board and nail it to the top of the fruit crate for handles. And there you have it: a scooter! A real noisy scooter at that. Those steel wheels sound like a freight train rolling down the sidewalk. A little paint and its customized to boot. That’s how I did it when I was a kid.

Kids today wouldn’t know anything about that. They’ve got those fancy neoprene wheel jobs that fold up and store in backpacks. The things are so quiet that they can sneak up on people and about knock them over before anyone’s the wiser. The other day I saw one that had an electric motor. Now I hear that some guy has invented a scooter that’s got an electric motor and gyroscopes. He calls it “It”. Its supposed to replace the car. The bottom line is that “It” is just a scooter after all. Some folks will just have to have one, like “It” will make them “IT”. But people in cars will not envy the “Itiots” when the rain falls.

In Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, the author says,

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has already been, in the ages before us.”

Well, it may not look entirely the same, but the idea will be familiar. Human nature does not seem to have changed all that much since Bible days. We’re still trying to improve our lives, and this new year will bring a spate of inventions to “gadgetize” those little vexations we meet every day. Yet the solution to the oldest problem, us, remains the same. We still need God to do the same old stuff we’ve always needed done. Forgive us from sin, take away our sadness, and give meaning to our lives. Someone may come up with a “new idea” or a pill that they claim will do the same. But Christ is still the only real deal that doesn’t wear off or leave you out of date.

So enjoy the new year and all the discoveries that will come with it. Just remember that God doesn’t change, and that’s a good thing. Think about it when you see one of those “It” contraptions coming down the street. Who knows, maybe next year’s model will have a fruit crate on the front.

Rev. Dennis P. Levin