Legacy is Meaning

Church history is your history.

I've been dwelling on the idea of legacy lately. 

It’s been a busy month, and because of that, I’ve unintentionally taken a month off from writing on Substack. One of those reasons was our church’s thirtieth anniversary celebration—the church my in-laws founded and the only church my husband has ever attended. My father-in-law may be the founding pastor, but the church has always had deep familial roots because my husband’s family has a strong legacy of faith, something that is admittedly a bit unfamiliar to me. 

Everyone in his family is a believer. Everyone. In each generation, going back to his grandparents, they all have active relationships with Jesus. It is a strange and beautiful thing to me when, on the rare occasion when we’re all together, we can all stand together before the throne of grace and worship our King. It is the culmination of countless prayers and longings throughout my childhood. It has been the evidence of God’s unmerited favor that he would place me in this family and simultaneously heal wounds I didn’t even know I had. He truly knows us better than we know ourselves. 

All of this has caused me to think more about what happens when one person commits their life to Christ. For so long, I believed the lie that my walk with Jesus was just about me. Maybe occasionally he would use me to bless someone along the way, but primarily it was just me and Jesus. I hadn’t thought that, maybe, out of my life, the Lord would want to build something that would outlast me.  

That’s what he did with my husband’s grandfather’s life. That’s what he’s doing with my parent’s lives—through their faithfulness, he has changed the trajectory of our family. 

I’ve just been so moved lately by this idea of standing among normal, everyday giants of the faith. Of knowing them—their faults, their gifts, their quirks, their laughter—and being spurred on by them. Of crafting this story of faith for my children, so that when they are discouraged, confused, and full of doubt, they can stand upon the knowledge that they belong to a story greater than themselves, that they are a part of a generational narrative, woven together by the Creator. 

And it’s not just biological family. God is not accomplishing his will exclusively through nuclear families, but through the family of God—his church. 

Some friends and I were recently talking about looking to our spiritual elders for encouragement in our faith, and I shared that I didn’t have any men or women in my life who were old in their faith. Like, old old. People who had walked with God for fifty, sixty, seventy years. I didn’t know what having a relationship with Jesus for that long even looked like. 

That is a loss of generational knowledge, and I felt it, even when I was young, even when I didn’t know it. It makes us think we are the only ones who have ever experienced anything. It makes fear, doubt, and suffering feel new and unbearable. It leaves us untethered and reliant on feelings and whatever knowledge we can acquire for ourselves. Legacy, on the other hand, grounds us, reminds us of who we are and where we’ve been, even if we haven’t actually been there before. Our people have, and their story becomes our story. Legacy offers us meaning. 

I didn’t have the kind of family legacy that many people do, that many cultures do. But when I needed it most, the Lord offered me something just as good: history. I stumbled upon a biography of missionary Jim Elliot, who gave his life to reach people who had never heard the gospel. I have no earthly connection to Jim Elliot, but in Christ, I have every spiritual connection to him. Through his words, Jim became like a spiritual uncle to me and encouraged me during a time of great uncertainty. 

That one little encounter with one life of faithfulness changed how I understood my relationship with God forever. It’s not just me and him against the world, floating around in a vacuum. It is me and all the saints who have ever lived and who will ever live, serving him with our lives. 

Amy Carmichael and Augustine and Bonhoeffer and Beth Moore and Gregory of Nyssa and Cyprian and Mary of Magdalene. We have all been adopted into this global family of faith, and because of that, they are all my spiritual mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, and yours, too. We stand on their shoulders as we aim, day in and day out, to live a life of faithfulness to the King. 

The narrative he has written is grand, and I do not stand outside of or apart from it just because my biological relatives are detached from him. No, we have been grafted in. Just as much a part of this legacy as if we were born into it. And as I walk in it more every year, I’m beginning to believe that the thing that keeps us—besides the Holy Spirit—is this knowledge of belonging to something as wildly marvelous as the family of God, not just in the present day but in all of history. It has wound its way through the last 2,000 years. Some of their names we know, and most of their names we don’t. But their lives and stories spur us on, reminding us we belong and that he will not let us go. This is the well we drink from, and it never runs dry.