A while back, I was staying at my family's cabin in Colorado for a few days over the summer. It's an old cabin, built in the early 1900's with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living room. It has the smells of fresh aspen and mountain air, making it better than living inside of a candle. It's full of squeaky floorboards, absent of cell phone reception and hooked up with tons of old mountain memorabilia. Frankly, it's one of my favorite places to go "get away" from everything.
Another thing this cabin has is an old rotary telephone. I don't know if you've ever seen one of these before, but essentially, it's a phone with circular dial board that, in order to dial, you have to place your finger in each number's place and slide it around the circle until the number you want dialed hits the end of the circle. Now, these kinds of phones are pretty old (I say that not to offend anyone that's lived in the era of rotary telephones, but to state just how far technology has come). They're old enough, in fact, that I went through life without knowing how to use one, so when it came to using the rotary phone at this cabin, I was clueless. I just thought, like most phones now a days, you just had to press the button where the number was you wanted to dial, and it would work; that's not the case. Needless to say, the first time I tried to use the rotary phone, I sat there for several seconds wondering why the phone wasn't dialing, ringing or connecting me call. For the first time in my life, my parents knew how to use a piece of technology that I didn't know how to use. For the first time in my life, I became aware that something so old could seem so new.
Old things seeming new is an interesting phenomenon. It's 2016, and we're all obsessed with things from 1916. Our culture loves vintage, retro, throwback and old-school memorabilia. We're intrigued by the nostalgia, the uniqueness and, frankly, the awesomeness of things from days past. Whether it's record players, vintage clothing or typewriters, we all love things from the past, and a lot of the things we love from the past can teach us something in the present.
Past things, no matter how old they are, tend to hold some sort of relevance today, and past things, no matter how old they are, can seem brand new to us when in all actuality, they're quite old. Just how old things seem new, the Bible is the same way. It was written hundreds of years ago, yet still, somehow, it speaks newness to different people all over the world every day. Just like I was able to learn something new from a 50-year-old telephone, I'm able to learn from a thousand-year-old book. No wonder we all love vintage; we learn things from it.
-Cliff
Cliff's Note: Don't discount anyone or anything because of age or place in time. There are things to be learned from the past.