“Disoriented, wandering, directionless.” This is not the descriptor of young people of 2022, but rather the description of the generation that came to adulthood during WWI and the early 1920s. Contemporary Ernest Hemmingway referred to his peers as the ‘The Lost Generation.”
This generation had seen the slaughter and brutality of a war that was fought in trenches and with machine guns and poisonous gas. Young adults from around the world were trying to make sense of a four-year long war that killed 8.5 million men and injured an additional 21 million. And what was particularly demoralizing was that all that carnage resulted in a stalemate.
Directly after the war, that generation then tried to survive and make sense of the Spanish Flu pandemic. The influenza pandemic disproportionately affected children and young adults and would eventually kill 50 million people worldwide (which is staggering considering the population at the time was 2 billion).
T.S. Eliot, a well-known Lost Generation poet, described life at the time as a “Waste Land” for its seeming futility and desolation.
Today, many young people are viewing life as a “Waste Land” because Covid’s lethalness, politics’ divisnessness, and social media’s cruelty. The grim outlook on life is producing a generation that feels lost. This generation can be described at the Lost Generation 2.0.
Into the “Waste Land” of our time, great hope and reassurance can be found in God and in history. The greatest history book—the Bible, accounts for God’s faithfulness from generation to generation and informs that while a generation may feel lost, ultimately all forms of lostness are ultimately not connected to a war or pandemic-related crisis, but rather from the original crisis of man’s sin and resulting separation from God.
But into that lostness, biblical history gives us the great hope of God’s redeeming work. History informs us that Jesus left heaven and came to find and save man who didn’t realize how lost he was without him.
In so doing, Christ split history into two. The B.C. ended and the Anno Domini (A.D.), the year of the Lord arrived. And in an ultimate act of redemption, the sinless Jesus died a brutal death and hung on a cross to pay once-and-for-all for the sin and rebellion of humanity so that those who place their faith in him can be eternally cured of lostness.
In this stage of history, we are still “grieved by various trials” (1. Pet. 1:6) and live in creation that is still “subjected to futility” (Rom. 8:20); yet because of our great Redeemer Jesus, we have the joy of knowing we that we are partaking of the same sufferings as he did and that he will even be glorified through our sufferings (1 Pet. 4:13). And in whatever we face, we live in the redemptive and eternal reality of the Resurrected Christ’s promise that, “I am with you to the end of the age” (Mat. 28:20).
God is with us. He is working. He is redeeming, even in a time that feels like a “Waste Land.” May we hold onto him and recall his faithfulness in history.