That’s the title of a book by Janette Oke. (An excellent Christian fiction read, by the way!) This weekend while I was madly scrubbing my house, I came across something I’d forgotten.
Well, I hadn’t forgotten, I’d just sort of…absorbed it as part of the landscape and didn’t really notice it anymore. Took it for granted.
But as I was moving everything off the bookshelf top to dust and polish, I found it again.
My father’s bible and hymn book.
Growing up, we didn’t live a daily faith. We didn’t say grace at every meal. We didn’t pray together as a family or have devotionals or talk about doctrine. We went to church and Sunday school and my parents both said they believed, but there was no witnessing, no bible reading, no Wednesday night prayer meetings.
I often wish I could ask them now–now that I understand what I believe so much better–what, exactly they believed. I’m not sure. I know the basics. I know they were raised Catholic (like I was) and Lutheran and believed what they were taught. Mostly. But it haunts me sometimes that I don’t know more than that. I don’t know how they used their faith. Our faith, growing up, was a secondary thing to the ins and outs of our daily life.
But then I stroke the cover of his old, delicate bible, leaf through the tissue thin pages of the song book…
Maybe I never saw him read it, but he had it. He kept it. He saved it as a personal treasure all those years and years from boyhood.
They did have faith. I saw it. I saw it in how they held their marriage together. I saw it in how they defied “the world” when it came to raising their children. I saw it when they supported and pushed and debated and encouraged me as I dug in deep and tunneled out my own beliefs.
Love’s unending legacy is faith.
Holding these books in the steamy summer sunshine on Saturday afternoon reminded me that faith and love are part of my heritage. My inheritance. My unending legacy.
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“Ya don’t just pass on faith. Ya have to pass on a desire fer ‘um to find a faith of their own. Ya have to show ’em daily in the way that ya live that what ya have is worth livin’ an’ fightin’ an’ workin’ fer. A secondhand faith is no good to anyone. It has to be a faith of their own.”
“Thet’s the secret,” Marty agreed with feeling. “A faith of their own. I am so thankful to God that each one of our children made their own decision to let God be in charge of their life.”
“An’ it doesn’t stop there–it goes on an’ on. They teach an’ train our grandchildren, an’ with God’s help, they can teach our great-grandchildren. It can go on an’ on an’ never end till Jesus comes back, ” added Clark. (Love’s Unending Legacy, Janette Oke)
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