By Dr. Gerald Sutek Th.D., Ph.D. (history)

Every roller coaster has its ups and downs.  You really can`t go down unless you make that slow, clicking, tension-heightening, thrill-building climb to another expected crest. But what if you built a roller coaster that had one final slide that picked up speed but never rounded the bottom of the valley...it just kept going down? 

The riders are all experiencing the same concern, but the common, hopeless, reality grips the minds, while the hearts pacify themselves with the thrill of the last crest just experienced.  The imminent disaster is obvious, but few prepare, and no one has access to the brake. This is my description of The Steepest Generation. 

The year was 1963. The junior band played "Pomp and Circumstance," as we half-stepped to the stage, shook hands with the principal and accepted our high school diplomas. While the commencement speaker said something about the past and the future, our thoughts were on the graduation party that night...then the beach tomorrow, the summer ahead and college in the fall.  Thus we crested this dizzy height and began what none of us could possibly predict to be the final descent of the steepest generation.

The climb to that crest was a most pleasurable 18 years of peace, prosperity, respectability and moral decency.  Our week began in church, and our school day began with prayer and Bible.  The distant hope of the next crest sustained us in our patriotic, theistic and simple daily habits, while our hearts could only toy with and imagine what sin was really about.  We played in a wading pool of iniquity without a notion of the looming ocean of filth, filled with twisted and drowning victims.

In our wading pool, if a couple slipped in over their heads they had to get married.  A divorce was the hushed gossip of a disgraced family.  An abortion only had to do with the saving of the mother...adoption, yes...abortion, huh?  A homosexual was confined to the lowest imaginable category of human involvement in perversion.  Sex-ed in school? Are you kidding? We would have been embarrassed to attend class and where would you ever get a teacher? Condoms handed out in the classroom? Hee hee...don`t tell the principal.  The only porn available was at the Roxy theater on the dark side of town. For those who could prove or feign legal age, it cost a dollar to see a flick with black bars hiding what we all knew ought to be hid. 

Mass murder was confined to a fabricated story to sell more Police Gazette magazines.  Later the same year, when the president of our country was shot and killed, it turned the world on its side in incredulous shock. 

Some today may mock this innocent bubble we lived in 50 years ago, but does any sane person prefer the aftermath of the bursting of this bubble?

Where is the bottom of this valley...where?  We are all eagerly awaiting the next exciting climb, but this alumnus of fifty years does not predict another climb.  "Righteousness exalteth a nation but sin is a reproach to any people," Proverbs 14:34.  This "Christian" nation is a past tense. The only escape from the final crash at the end of this scary descent is in the following verse:  "...repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ," Acts 20:21. 

The same year I graduated from high school, I took this emergency escape off the doomed roller coaster and have been on an ascent ever since that leads straight into eternal life. The greatest thing in the world is to know for certain that when you die you`re going to heaven.  There is no valid argument against the above statement.

Many today are searching for the key to that emergency exit that Dr. Sutek found but don`t know where to look. Every Chick gospel tract contains a copy of that key. It only takes a couple seconds to hand someone a tract so they can get off that doomed roller coaster. Order a Chick Tract Assortment pack today and start your own rescue operation.