what’s your legacy?

Grandma Great left us a legacy. An extremely valuable one, but it isn’t what you would expect.

By definition legacy is a thing handed down from an ancestor or predecessor. Often times, our minds jump right to a financial legacy. Legacy is so much more. It is our financial wealth, but it is also all of who we are. Our character, our spiritual walk, the things we value, and the traditions we set.

Grandma’s Journal

Grandma Great valued her journals. They are where she kept years of memories. This one is from her teenage years. Early in her marriage, her husband, Alvin insisted she destroy the pages she’d written about her previous boyfriends. I’m fairly certain that no one ever made Grandma Great do anything. She cut them out and hid them from Alvin for over 60 years of their marriage. He never knew.  

We lived with Grandma Great for over 7 years before she passed away and every evening we would see her write in her journal. When she was young, she wrote paragraphs. As she grew older and into her eighties and nineties, the paragraphs became a single line of the most important things in her day.

She left us a legacy that we never saw coming. Obviously, the journals are filled with stories about her life. That is a gift, but we didn’t know the value until after she passed away.

As a way to process her death and mourn, our youngest daughter Tziporah took Grandma Great’s journals and read through them. A name jumped out at her. It was her own.

The pages were filled with accounts of all the ways that Grandma Great had instilled her faith and character into our children. We had no idea. She was with the kids while we worked. We found pages and pages of how she and our kids had interacted and how they had helped each other with doing life on the farm.

That’s when Bryce and I realized the value of the legacy she left. Not only was Grandma Great’s legacy the journal, but so were our children.

A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children,            but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.                                  -Proverbs 13:22 NIV

Do your parents and grandparents know their legacy? Are you intentionally creating yours? Now is a great time to start.

Searching for wisdom and asking for grace,

Jody