Provide A Sense of
Roots
"A mule always boasts that its ancestors were horses."
A GERMAN PROVERB
I don't believe in living in the past, but the past lives in us. Grandparents, we are living history, the results of the richness of a heritage that we can will to our children and grandchildren.
We should be indebted to Alex Haley and his fascinating book, Roots, and to the television program that kept so many of us absorbed in the story of his ancestry. However, Haley did not invent the concept of tracing genealogy. He revived our desire to discover our origins. Libraries suddenly were deluged with requests for old newspapers and history books. People who had little interest in their family trees began to research and ask Grandma and Grandpa questions.
Many Christians who engage in a through-the-Bible personal study joyfully skip over the long chapters of "begats," but spend months unearthing the name of a great-great-great-grandfather. The Old Testament is a study in genealogy, but modern day Americans have become rootless, until recently. In our search for solidity in a shifting, uncertain world, we like to learn about times that seemed safer, more secure.
Children want to know about their parents and grandparents: What did they do when they were young, where did they live; how did they think? Okay, grandparents, now we have our chance. We can make a unique contribution by providing
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the biographical anecdotes that give color and reality to past generations.
King Solomon had plenty of bucks to leave to his family, yet he wrote this advice: "When a good man dies, he leaves an inheritance to his grandchildren..." (Proverbs 13:22). Solomon wasn't talking about an inheritance of money, but that of memories, knowledge, and history.
Biographies are written about the rich, the famous, or the infamous, and many grandparents might say, "How can I be living history? I'm not important. I've just had a very ordinary life."
No life is ordinary. God has given us experiences that no one else has had. What was mundane for us may be magic to our grandchildren.
Penny, a young woman with two small children of her own, was visiting her mother and going through some of the memorabilia her recently deceased grandmother had left. In a soiled shoe box she found some tiny handmade baby dresses, yellowed and crumpled with age. "Look at these, Mom," she said, holding up a tiny dress, "can you imagine ironing all of these every day?" One little dress had tiny, hand-crocheted flowers all over the collar and around the hem. Mother and daughter began to muse over the time it took Grandma to sew such a garment. Here was the granddaughter, discovering a treasure that only she could appreciate and taking the fragile little dress home to wash and frame for her own daughter. Did Great-grandmother know that she would be living history when she strained her eyes to put those infinitesimal stitches in a child's garment?
Our lives, grandparents, may seem ordinary to us, but they will be unusual to our grandchildren. Did you ever ride on a train across the United States, eat in a dining car while the prairies of Kansas or the mountains of Colorado whizzed by
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your window? Your grandchildren may never have been on a train.
Did you play kick the can or home free during long summer evenings, falling into bed exhausted, while your mother put lotion on your mosquito bites? Your grandchildren may be wondering what you did before television. They have never known what life was like before the tube.
Do you remember the corner drugstore, where the benevolent owner allowed you to sit every afternoon after school and sip five-cent cherry Cokes and flirt for two hours? Your grandchildren may have lessons, clubs, and Scouts and wonder if your life was dull without all these activities.
In the past few decades technology has advanced so fast that our grandchildren may think that transcontinental jets, instant replay of football games, and McDonald hamburgers have been permanent American fixtures. Do you think, grandparents, we have led ordinary lives? We can remember when the corner grocery store had bins of cookies and the owner would let us dip our hands in and take one or two. We remember our first airplane ride, Pearl Harbor, and V-E Day. We remember Hitler's voice on the radio and Mussolini standing on his balcony. We remember our reaction when we heard that John F. Kennedy was shot. That is living history.
No Moral to This Story
Many parents have not shared a lot about their childhood with their own children. Or perhaps they have told the same story over and over again, adding the moral in such a syrupy way that the kids are automatically turned off. However, when the grandchildren come along, it's easier just to tell the stories without moralizing. Grandchildren need to know about the dismal times, as well as the happy times. The greatest myth of all is that childhood is happy. Many times it is miserable, and
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knowing that others have faced hard problems will be helpful to our grandchildren when life confronts them with challenges.
One young man, growing up in a Los Angeles suburb, listened for an hour while his grandmother told him about her life in a small town. Her father had been a railroad switchman, and they lived in a two-story house near the tracks. They took in boarders for extra money, and Grandma told about the dinners around the big table, with chairs for twenty, and the mounds of potatoes and pot roast that would be consumed. After dinner everyone went into the parlor, and Grandmother played the piano and led singing. This was another time, another era, but living history for the young man who thought all music came from a stereo and the only decent potatoes were french fries smothered with catsup.
The mini-history lesson began because Grandma showed him a picture of herself sitting on a piano bench, with her very fat Dalmatian perched beside her. No moral to the story, but another thread to tie together the fragmented generations.
We are very important, grandparents, as the family historians.
Not Toynbee, Just Me
Where to start? First, with the inevitable photo albums. They may be more cumbersome, but slide projectors have a tendency to break, and movie projectors may not always be available. Pictures are always accessible.
One grandmother collected Bibles and the genealogy of the family, as well as the chronology of births, weddings, and deaths that provided a vital link in her family's history.
Consider writing your autobiography on cassette tape, or put it down in a diary. The person who knows the most about you is yourself, and someday that information only you know will be valuable to your family.
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If the idea of sitting down and writing is awesome to you, try making an outline and dictating into a cassette recorder. Your grandchildren will cherish The Chronicles of Grandma, or whatever you wish to title it, and you will leave a legacy that can't be matched.
Talk about:
The names of your mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, and others as far back as you have traced. Tell something about them: their occupation, what happened of significance in their lives.Where you were born, what your childhood was like.
Places you have visited.
Historic events you have witnessed.
Jobs you have had, places you have worked.
Schools you have attended.
What your parents did when you were a child.
Funny, exciting, tragic, happy things that have happened.
I realize that everyone can't build a museum, like Roy and I have in Victorville, but every grandparent can have a perpetuating family museum of the collectibles handed down from generation to generation.
What are roots, anyhow? They are the means by which the plant grows, the flower blossoms, the tree flourishes. We can let our grandchildren know our roots in Jesus Christ. How did we come to know Him? Tell them about the churches we attended, the Sunday-school teachers we remember. What a legacy!
And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all
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God's children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.
Ephesians 3:17-19
