King of Assyria! Your shepherd leaders, in charge of caring for your people, are busy doing everything else but. They’re not doing their job, and your people are scattered and lost. There’s no one to look after them. – Nahum 3:18

It’s possible that one reason the seesaw is such a popular item in the playground is that it mirrors life. One minute we’re up and the next minute, we’re down. People seem to run in cycles.

A long time ago, I read a book on millionaires. I can’t remember the exact title and I don’t know who wrote it, but it had some interesting information on families who amass a lot of money. One of the stories was about a Vietnamese couple who came to the United States and opened a store in a mall in a big city. They lived in the back of their store and saved every penny.  Eventually, they were able to move their living space out of the mall and to purchase a small house. While their kids got jobs to help with the finances, they were all able to go to college and the parents became millionaires, paving the way to wealth for their kids. The sad thing is that this book also told how many generations it took for all those millions of dollars to disappear – and it wasn’t very many.

It has been said that John Quincy Adams, the son of one of America’s founding fathers John Adams, said, “I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” We want to look to the future in hopes that the world might improve to the point where violence is no longer taken for granted. Sadly, our seesaw of life may move gracefully into the air, but if we aren’t careful, it can fall back to earth with a painful thud.

In its heyday, Assyria forgot its struggle to become a nation ruling the world. It started taking its position for granted and took advantage of its mighty armies, its vast wealth, and its world domination. It started thinking that it could do no wrong.  It crossed the line and God responded.

If we don’t keep telling the stories of how our ancestors lived – the sacrifices they made to provide security and stability for their families – we tend to forget the strength, the courage, and the wisdom that brought us to where we are today. If we forget the principles that guided our ancestors through the generations, we start following other principles that don’t take into consideration the rights of the people around us.

When we don’t have to work to obtain and maintain status and power over others, we think that what we have is a right that we were given because of our obvious superiority. That’s about the time when the seesaw of life descends rapidly.

Assyria was attacked and its cities destroyed until essentially it disappeared. It’s important to remember who we are so that we keep an eye on the proverbial “line drawn in the sand.”

Becky Gillette is a former teacher, newspaper reporter, and preacher who seeks to take an original approach to life’s lessons. She is the author of “Jessie’s Corner: Something to Think About,” a collection of articles which she wrote for a weekly newspaper.