# Der Lutheraner_Frankfurt am Main_Juni 1948_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Page 42 June 1948 Number 6

which still lie upon your path of life, and there you will recognize, astonished, how your heavenly Father, your Lord and Savior, has also ordered and guided your life according to a lovingly conceived and wonderfully worked-out plan of God. Nothing has he done wrongly; everything in your life he has conceived and carried out for the salvation of your soul, for your eternal perfection and transfiguration. One day you will, astonished and worshiping, fold your hands, the tears of adoration will come to you, and you will, if I may put it this way, also weep long upon the neck of your Savior for joy and gratitude that he has made everything so good.

It has once been said: Our life is like a carpet on which our great God is working. A carpet has an upper side and an underside. On the underside one sees light and dark threads running together in confusion and disorder, but on the upper side one sees the meaningful pattern of the artist. We look upon our life here on earth only from the underside, and there bright and dark days seem to run together confusedly and senselessly, but in eternity we shall be permitted to behold it from the upper side, and there we will see, astonished, what a wonderful, glorious pattern and work of art our great, gracious God will have made of our life, how bright and dark times had to alternate with one another. His great thoughts of love he will have woven in like shining silk threads. That will become a wonder of his love and wisdom, and it will belong to the great blessednesses of eternal life to discover ever new beauties and wonders of grace in one's own life as in that of the other blessed ones. How the tears of joy, of adoration, of gratitude will flow there! How we will join in the song of praise of the great apostle Paul: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen."

Often we may already behold such wonders of grace of his love here on earth, is that not so? Most certainly! He is a wonderful God!
Görlitz Priegel

Building blocks for the construction of a genuinely Lutheran youth community

Our church youth work is experiencing, after years of stagnation, a rebuilding that fills us with joyful hope for the future of the church. We give an experienced youth leader of our church the floor for the following thoughts on youth work and to the youth.

If our youth is to grow into the life of the congregation and church in a living and faith-strong way, then two things must be well noted from the outset!

1. Youth must shape its life out of its own, self-won, genuine substance of life. It can never simply accept what has been handed down and put it on like a ready-made (more or less fitting) garment. The life of youth cannot simply be a straight-line continuation of that of the older generation. Whoever does not recognize this misjudges youth, denies essential stages of his own youth. The youth of every age must cut and make its own garment.

2. To continue speaking in the image: material and tools for this are handed over by the preceding generation. And how fortunate a Lutheran youth is in this regard! In the first decade of our century the youth, repelled by an inwardly false civilization and way of life of "the elders," repelled all the more by a church that was no longer able to take its own message seriously and yet did not cease to proclaim it, had almost to seek, in a near-revolutionary way, a ground of life for itself on which something genuine and full-valued could be built. Nothing else remained for it but to descend, as into a shaft, into the romanticism and idealism of past times (whither indeed a degenerate preaching of the church also pointed!), in order to bring up treasures there whose inferior worth had soon to become apparent. — A Lutheran youth, however, has the full values that can shape its life into a truly whole and genuine thing. Lutheranism gives us the only firm foundation, gives us also the best building blocks from which youth can build a house that becomes a fortress for it. Lutheran youth is relieved of the painful distress of a break with the preceding generation. It takes up the work that this generation, having received it from the forefathers, passes on to it. Thus independent and genuine, but firmly rooted in what has been handed down! There may be tensions, but that is indeed beautiful and "worth the sweat of the noble." We are not ruminants. But we are discoverers who press forward into new land, following the traces of those who went before.

Let me toss you a few building blocks:

Unconditional truthfulness!

A watchword of that idealistic youth of 40 years ago, which is also today the first prerequisite for fruitful work. We fill it with deeper meaning.

Unconditional truthfulness in your personal life. Neither fellow-traveling and dull habitual routine nor hypocritical adornment, whitewash coating, shall our faith, that is our whole life, be. Let us strive for genuineness. Hypocrisy is the most dangerous of all dangers. "The Lord lets it succeed for the upright!" Nothing made up and merely outwardly inculcated, not appearance and façade! May God grant you deep shame over every hypocrisy and heartfelt joy in honest, solid character!

Therefore the first and most earnest effort must be directed toward not merely grasping the truths and saving facts of our faith through outward learning, but toward inwardly processing them, transferring them into one's own life. Here each one must strive on his own for complete clarity and for the full genuineness of his faith. Each must give account before himself of his state of faith, his share in the faith of his church; each must examine himself, measure his life against the standard of the knowledge gained!

Unconditional truthfulness among one another. With yourself you may prefer to be too strict, but with your neighbor mild and forbearing. Openness and brotherly love must create the possibility of helping one another, of educating one another. To this belong humility and honest self-knowledge. "To be more than to seem!" Let no one push himself into the foreground to satisfy childish ambition, let no one overestimate himself and his worth while despising the other's share in the community! Everyone shall join in, be able to join in, encouraged by the fine understanding and the open brotherly manner of the others' criticism. Do not organize! Do not create offices and dignities! A living organism shall your community be! There every member does its service.

Unconditional truthfulness in the choice of what you want to do. Supreme principle: whatever wants to disturb or spoil for us the life of grace, the joy in the Lord, is forbidden! Forbidden out of inner truthfulness.

The noblest and best that people have created shall be good enough for us. Our life, our youth community, shall be for us a building of God (made possible and given only through his grace)! But just as one chooses only noble material and noble forms for a church building, so let it be our concern, with a strict standard and high demand, to choose the means and ways that shall serve our youth life. New wine is not put into old wineskins. The new man also needs "a new garment of the finest cloth."

In the world of broken existences and hopelessness we have a high task. We have to show the world of sinners' hearts broken by God's law and healed again by God's grace, the world in which one lives only by grace, and the wealth, the strength, of a person who is sinner and saint in one.

Do we want a soft and comfortable, self-indulgent life? We are called to the fronts of life's battle. Who would want to stay behind?

Leipzig Rüger