Zora watched the young women in her group chatter about their kids and households. She remembered those days when she was just happy to get out with friends her own age, as much as she loved her household. Zora hadn’t initially known what had drawn her to this group of women, a generation younger than her. Yet she soon realized that it was to broaden and deepen her legacy. Zora wanted not just to have cared passionately for her household but also to have cared in the same way for other households, for other women who were carrying their own torches through the wilderness and toward the palace. Zora was in sight of the palace now. She just wanted to be sure that every other woman caring for her household would see the palace, too. And Zora wanted no less than that to be her legacy.

You

The first person who cares about your legacy is you. That is, you should care. If you’re not caring about your legacy, whether consciously or unconsciously, then you’re missing something very important in life. You don’t have to be thinking about legacy all the time. Indeed, you might be unhealthy if you did. But it’s your legacy that nudges you to make that phone call to check on a friend that you should have made last week. It’s your legacy that gets you up out of the easy chair you finally settled into at the end of a wearying day, to play catch with the neighbor’s lonely kid. Your legacy is why you said yes to serving on the parks board a second term when you could instead have been home with your feet up watching your favorite show. And it’s your legacy that nudges you to still be wise with your finances when you no longer need to be so wise to provide for your own needs. Legacy silently spurs all those little and big things you do that sow seeds and to tend their sprouts, when you have no personal need or strong interest in doing so other than the residue of hope it leaves. You need that silent spur to move out of yourself and upward toward the light.

Parents

Your parents need your legacy, too. Parents might be the last ones you’d think would be concerned about your legacy, when you are a part of theirs. But that’s exactly the point. Your parents see in the lasting quality of your actions the influence of their own actions. Few things are more painful to a parent than to see their adult child doing or becoming something that they regret, while believing the looming development to be their own fault in how they raised their child. And few things are more satisfying to a parent than to see their adult child doing and becoming things that they admire, while hoping the flowering to have something to do with how they raised their child. Children are a legacy. When you care for your own legacy, you care for your parents’ legacy. Your parents care about your legacy because your legacy is their own. The command to honor your mother and father doesn’t mean an occasional obsequious bow. The command instead means to do and be what would make them believe in the honorable quality of their own legacy, of which you are the biggest part. I knew a mom from a poor neighborhood whose greatest hope was that her children would stay out of jail. Sounds like the least that we could do for our parents, doesn’t it? Do more.

Spouse

Your spouse needs your legacy, too. The legacies of spouses are intertwined, indeed are one. One spouse may be a saint and the other a sinner, but then, the saint’s legacy will be as the spouse of a sinner and vice versa. The stronger legacy is one in which both spouses share the same or similar commitments to leaving the world a better place. The legacy of two can be so much more than the sum of its parts. The legacy of a married couple isn’t just one plus one equals two. A married couple exhibits things that a lone person cannot, in their care for one another, the complementarity they show, the adjustments they make, and the path they take together that neither would have taken alone. A married couple can also be so much more productive in forming and maintaining a household out of which blessings of all kinds flow. Those blessings include everything from children and grandchildren to neighborhood care and community service, and beyond to work and business activities that generate wealth shared down through generations. Yet none of that happens without the couple’s trust in one another and commitment together to receive, share, and pass on those blessings. Give your spouse the gift of a rich legacy.

Siblings

Your brothers and sisters, and even your cousins, too, draw from your legacy. Many of us have had a scoundrel among our siblings and cousins, one who is usually absent from family reunions and thus the subject of quiet talk. If instead the scoundrel shows up for the reunion, things may not go so well, with offense taken, followed by some heated talk, leaving everyone to return home to remember the scoundrel’s fresh wound for years. By contrast, family reunions draw their joy, energy, and vitality from the sibling or cousin whose commitments and qualities leave a trail of gifts. One, two, or three family members of the same generation shine over the gatherings like the beacons who they are, spreading hope, love, and light. The larger family pulls together on the brilliant web their love has woven, a legacy that lasts well beyond their earthly years. All one needs to do to regain one’s sense of affinity with the world and assured place within it is to remember that one is part of that sibling’s gilded web. A sibling committed to a family legacy never leaves one thinking that one is alone and unknown in the world. Without saying a word, a respected brother, sister, or cousin tells you that the world is just as much your place as anyone else’s place. Share the gift of your legacy with your siblings and cousins.

Children

Children are the most obvious heirs to your legacy. Your children care about your legacy more than anyone else because they are your legacy. What you do for your legacy you do for them. Children of despicable parents live in their shadow. No matter how well those children live for themselves and their own legacy, they find it hard to crawl out from under that shadow. In the worst case, they succumb like their parents, in which case everyone would say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And that image is another way to look at your legacy, as a tree that bears fruit of one sort or another. If the tree bears bad fruit, then the children find it very hard to get out from under the tree. Legacies can cast shadows. Yet legacies can also bear good fruit. In that instance, the children will feed from the good fruit of the tree long after the parents have passed. Even as elderly adults, their friends will say remember when your parents... and then repeat some special grace the parents had shared decades earlier. Trees don’t just cast shadows. They also attract light and grow fruit. You may leave whatever legacy you wish to your children, material or immaterial, positive or negative. Think long and hard about the qualities of the legacy you’re leaving your children.

Grandchildren

Nowhere is your legacy more evident than in the faces of your grandchildren. One sees in their joy, good health, solid development, and good character everything one needs for reassurance about one’s legacy. You care so directly for your children that one finds it hard to think of them as your legacy. But you care for your grandchildren differently, through their own parents, your children. Your influence on your grandchildren isn’t generally in the direct care you give them, although you might support their parents, your children, with the direct care of grandchildren, too. In the natural order of things, your care for your grandchildren is legacy care, not nurturing care. Their parents, your children, provide for their needs. You provide for their trust and confidence in the broader world. Your presence shows them that outside their parental home lies a wider circle of caring interests. You bequeath not a meal on the dining table but confidence that dining tables are a thing of their heritage and thus their future. You give your grandchildren hope not in their own survival, which their parents have already assured, but in the survival and thriving of society across generations. You may also bless your grandchildren with loving kindness, a family heritage, and even generational wealth. But your love for them and interest in them alone assures them that the world beyond their parental home is good.

Neighborhood

Your legacy matters to your neighbors, too. Americans move around a lot. But anyone who remains in a neighborhood across a generation knows how steady care for and interest in those next door and just down the street knits a neighborhood together. Let your kids care for neighbors’ pets or lawns, while you help your neighbors over illnesses and through losses, and they help you in return. Host the annual summer neighborhood cookout and help organize the annual neighborhood Christmas party. And before long, you’ll be watching your grown children returning to the annual neighborhood parties with new grandchildren, while you all reminisce over those who have departed for other neighborhoods or for greener pastures in the great beyond. You’ll realize that we benefit not just from families but also from families connecting with families, forming extended networks of care. If you remain long enough in the same neighborhood, you’ll notice that the spirit of certain departed neighbors still inhabits the gatherings, in their joy, vitality for life, exuberance, and faith in good things coming in a future still far off. That’s a legacy’s influence on a neighborhood, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Community

Your community also benefits from your legacy. Study your community’s history, and you’ll find that your community is a product of the aspirations, vision, and inspiration of its more-influential members. You may not count yourself among those leading members. Yet the character and vitality of a community isn’t so much the bequest of a small number of leading members as it is the gift of large numbers of the faithful who shared the vision and its vitality. Your town may bear the name of its founder, or the town’s library, hospital, or college may bear that name. Yet the faithful who funded, staffed, and served the library, hospital, and college are just as significant in their influence as the one who left the name. Do your part in and for your community. If you can, take the lead. Your legacy may not end up on monuments and markers around town. Your faded photograph may not hang in city hall, and you may not lend your name to a street. But your contribution will nonetheless linger in the strength and steadiness of your town’s heartbeat. 

Career

Legacies also reach careers. Trades, professions, vocations, crafts, and callings have their cultures, attitudes, and spirits. Any doctor who has practiced in more than one community or lawyer who has practiced in more than one bar knows that each professional community has its own character. Trades and businesses can likewise differ from region to region. Some of those vocational communities are compassionate, considerate, and caring. Other vocational communities are rough and tumble, competitive, and even cutthroat. Some vocational communities are innovative, while others are staid, even within the same profession, trade, or craft. A new entrant from another region will occasionally hear that’s not how we do things around here, until having made the adjustments. That differing spirit is the legacy of those who have practiced there. And vocational legacies reach more than culture. Legacies you leave within your calling can also include the calling’s knowledge, skills, and ethics. You may be the first in your craft to discover and put into good practice a solution to a long-standing problem. Good for you, then, and good for every craftsperson who follows you. Don’t hesitate to see your vocation as a legacy field. Look around your craft, and you’ll see the legacies of others.

Church

Your church is likewise a legacy field, indeed a rich one for leaving a lasting imprint. In their best iteration, churches take an eternal view of everything, making legacy always the point. The treasure of a church is always in the realm beyond, from which legacies come and to which legacies go. Every church in your town depended on a founder or group of founders, whose legacy is the church. Every church in your town continues to depend on leaders, benefactors, congregants, contributors, and custodians of its heritage, who pass that heritage along for others to enjoy. Churches differ from city halls, municipal hospitals, and public schools in that churches are voluntary, self-funded organizations. Without willing volunteers committed to their continued existence as an expression of their received faith, churches wouldn’t exist. Pour your passion for legacy into your church, and heaven will judge your legacy most precious.

School

Your school is also a legacy field, at whatever level and of whatever public or private sort. Some remain connected through teachers, children, and grandchildren to their elementary or secondary schools, while others find their college or university to be their lifelong educational identity and academic home. Some have two, three, four, or more generations all attend the same local elementary and secondary schools, private schools, or college or university. Even if the school community that continues to call your heart was only your own school, and not the school of your parents, children, or grandchildren, you may find yourself leaving your legacy there, too. You may speak, teach, mentor, donate, recreate, and celebrate there, leaving your imprint. Dozens of others may also share their best with the school to make it more than a utilitarian function of the city or state. You can make your school a part of your legacy. Your school also cares.

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how significant is your legacy to you in motivating and guiding you as to what to do and not do? Would giving your legacy more attention and making your legacy more significant to you improve your outlook, impact, and outcomes? What do or did your parents think of your character and emerging legacy? Are they or were they proud of you? How do you and your spouse share the legacy that the two of you are building? Do you each see your legacy as drawing on the same values for the same ends? How have your siblings and cousins inspired you in the trajectory of their lives? Is the course of your life inspiring them? What legacy are you leaving your children? And how are your children contributing to your own legacy? Do you see your character and commitments in the spirit of your grandchildren? How could you more positively influence your grandchildren, without interfering with their parents’ care? How are you leaving a legacy in your neighborhood, community, career, church, or school? Which of those are most important to you?

Key Points

• Care about your legacy, which is not just for others but also for you.

• Your character and commitments affect or affected your parents.

• Your spouse shares a legacy with you.

• Your siblings and cousins benefit from your legacy, too.

• Your children are the natural heirs of your legacy.

• You can see your legacy in your grandchildren, too.

• Your neighborhood benefits from your legacy in its own way, too.

• Your community involvement broadens your legacy.

• Your profession or vocation is a locus for your legacy, too.

• As a volunteer faith organization, your church invites your legacy.

• Your school may be an attractive locus to focus your legacy, too.

Read Chapter 4.