Anna was always surprised by how her life story seemed to inspire others. To Anna, her life was just her life, the only life she’d lived. In that sense, her life didn’t really inspire Anna. But she was happy that her life inspired others. As she realized that her life meant something to others, Anna began to think how she might share her story for that purpose, not to brag because she didn’t feel as if she had anything to brag about, but instead simply to encourage others. Anna knew she’d depart her earthly life without leaving anyone a fortune or having solved a great mystery or made a huge discovery. But if she could leave an account of her life that inspired someone, anyone, then maybe that was the legacy that God had planned for her.

Story

The world turns around stories because the world is itself a story, indeed, the revelation of the creator’s grand narrative. We communicate through stories, learn through stories, and remember through stories for the same reason, that the world lays itself out to us as a story. We are made for stories, and we are stories. We cannot think, see, discern, and act without perceiving, pursuing, and participating in stories. Stories inhabit and imbue the world, capturing and influencing us, leading us along, and weaving us into their accounts. The world’s story is one of the creator’s desperate love not just for his creation but particularly and centrally for humankind, including specifically you. Know your own story, as you know the creator’s story for the world. Indeed, weave your story into the creator’s story for the world in the way that the creator knit you together to share and reveal more of his story. Your legacy shines when your story is the one the creator gave you in the world.

Legacies

Legacies are thus more stories than anything else. Oh, sure, legacies can include material gifts, monetary fortunes, sentimental memories, sound values, stirring commitments, and heartening traditions. But more than anything of those things, legacies are narratives or accounts of a life that lift, guide, and inspire, in their resonance with the creator’s own story for the world. Your life story reflects the world’s creation story. You, like the world, are a miracle of creation, with all the potential of a fabulously good world but also all of the pitfalls that come with the world’s chaotic and deadly disorder. You, like the world, will return to dust except as you reach for the creator’s resurrection to his paradise realm beyond. Your story, like the world’s story, is one of the creator’s pursuit of your heart as he reveals his love and grace to you through your experiences. The more your story resonates with the creator’s story for the world, the more your story leaves a rich legacy inspiring your heirs and successors, and others whom your legacy touches and influences. 

Sharing

To preserve, enhance, and promote your legacy, you should be willing to share your story. Everyone has a story to share. Being willing to share your story with others is how your legacy gets communicated. Your legacy depends on how and with whom you share your story, and the story you share. Some people spill out their stories without the listener even asking, without even caring if the listener is truly listening. On they go, sharing their hardest times and worst experiences with strangers, relating their trauma matter of factly to anyone nearby as if some sort of therapy. That’s not what one should do for a legacy. Don’t burden others with your life’s hardships, especially when they’re not interested and not listening. Don’t share your story for you; instead share your story for your reader or listener. Share your story as a mentor and friend, as a guide and counselor, with your story a lesson, warning, and encouragement. 

Inspiration

Make your legacy story an inspiration, not a burden. Inspiring with your story doesn’t mean making things up. It doesn’t mean sugar-coating difficulties and challenges. Inspiration instead requires revealing truths and insights, attributes and aspects of the world and the realm beyond, through your story. To inspire another is to encourage them along a fruitful path. Your story should thus reveal the fruitful path. A story has direction to it. To inspire, your story’s overall direction should be an upward course, not a downward path, even if the upward aspect is simply that you learned from your downward jaunts. A depressing story is one that teaches no lesson other than that all hope is lost. An inspiring story is one that teaches that hope is never lost, even in the hardest of circumstances. People care about your story when they see their story within your story, when your story is a pattern for their own because your story fits the pattern the realm beyond gives the world. 

Discerning

To discern your story’s inspiration, connect it with the inspiration that dwells deep within the world. The greatest inspiration has to do with the world’s great love story, the account for which the creator made the world. In that story, the creator reveals himself as love, holding within himself both a Father and Son who between them hold a perfect love. The creator also holds within himself a perfect Spirit communicating the perfect love between Father and Son. All three, Father, Son, and Spirit, are at once both perfect community and complete unity. This loving creator made the world to reveal himself as love to a humankind whom he made after his own image. You are the image of the loving creator. Like the creator, you hold within yourself a community and unity of love. The creator’s story also reveals that the creator loves through sacrifice. The creator remade the world through sacrifice, giving himself to put us back on our path to the loving creator. Thus, look in your life for the evidence of the creator’s love for you and those whom you touch through your own love and sacrifice. Make your account one of loving sacrifice, both the creator for you and you for others, weaving others into the creator’s story.

Connecting

You share your legacy and the inspiring story that forms it and dwells within it by connecting with the individuals and communities around you and maintaining those connections. Live as a hermit, and few will know your story. Live as a friend, encourager, supporter, and participant, and many will know your story. Your marriage, children, family, career, volunteering, and worship will connect you with many individuals throughout the course of your life. You share your story and legacy best through those organic connections. When your children mature and leave the home, and you end your career in retirement, you can easily lose many of the organic connections through which you shared your story and legacy. Later in life, when your story is richest and fullest, and you best discern its inspiration, you may find fewer natural connections through which to share your story. You may need to be more deliberate about volunteering, serving, socializing, staying in touch, and consistently reaching out to friends and family members. Continue to make your presence felt, even if gently, so that you can continue to encourage others with your legacy story.

Leadership

While later in life you may lose many of the organic connections through which you share your story and its inspiration, later in life you may also find opportunities for leadership through which you can share your story. The skill, insight, and experience you accumulate over the course of a lifetime, and the discernment and judgment you develop, are valuable to communities and organizations. Be open and willing when organization leaders approach you to serve on boards, councils, task forces, and committees. Volunteer for organization leadership positions. And once there, share the inspiration of your story. Draw on the patterns and wisdom your story reveals to guide and encourage the organizations you serve. Your leadership can both share your story’s inspiration and enhance your legacy. Help the organizations that you lead to discern their own story and enrich their own legacies, after the pattern your own story reveals. 

Forums

You may in your later years find several forums through which you can share your story and its inspiration. As just indicated, boards, committees, and councils are one kind of forum suitable for inspiration. You need not share your story in a grand soliloquy to the council of which you are a member. Doing so wouldn’t advance the work of the council. But you may instead speak into the issues before your council, drawing on your own experience. Councils choose their members for that reason, to draw on their experiences for wisdom, guidance, and inspiration. Adjust the way in which you share your story to the forum in which you are participating. Volunteering on a board or task force lets you speak your experience into the matters before the body. Teaching a course or speaking to students lets you speak your experience into the subject the students are learning. Mentoring an individual or group of individuals lets you speak your experience into the challenges and opportunities the individuals are facing. Socializing with friends or catching up with family members gives you another forum to share the encouragement within your story. Seek forums in which to share your story. You are not acting selfishly when your story sows inspiration into the forums you find.

Forms

You also have a variety of forms in which you can share your story and thereby enhance your legacy. Public speaking at events, in classes, and on councils, is one only one form in which to share your story. Speaking privately with friends, proteges, counselees, and others with whom you meet or whom you encounter one-on-one is certainly another way to share your story. But you may also write your story. You may of course write and share memoirs, family histories, and autobiographical accounts. Yet you may also weave your story into blogs and articles on current events, subjects within your field, or even technical issues. You may also share your story in written social media posts. You may also share aspects of your story in video, whether in social media shorts, podcast interviews, or recordings specifically to share family history and traditions with other family members. Some estate planning attorneys and services offer video services to share messages with loved ones along with the estate plan after the decedent’s demise. Charities encouraging bequests may also offer to record and publicize your legacy with signs, plaques, website testimonials, and other writings, video, and images promoting your legacy. Don’t miss the opportunity to share your legacy in different forms and forums.

Reflection

What account can you give of your life that inspires others? Can you articulate how the legacy that you wish to leave reflects your life story? Can you discern the connection between your legacy story and the creator’s story? What lesson would you have your grandchildren learn from your life story? What lesson from your legacy story would you want someone struggling with despair to know? What inspiration does your story offer for an aimless young person who needs direction? Where do you most often and most effectively get to share your story as inspiration? Can you find public speaking opportunities through which to share your story? Have you written your story or aspects of it? Can you do more writing in which you share your story in different forums and formats? Should you write an account for your family that would encourage, guide, and inspire them? Do you have social media or video forums through which to share your story?

Key Points

• We communicate and learn through stories, as the world is a story.

• Your legacy is itself a story, an account of your life and commitments.

• You can enhance your legacy by communicating it as your story.

• Your story should inspire others with hope for their own story.

• Your story inspires others when connected with the creator’s story.

• Share your story with others organically through natural connections.

• Accept leadership opportunities to share wisdom from your story.

• You have public and private forums through which to share your story.

• You can share your story by speaking, writing, and recording video.

Read Chapter 19.