In his book, Your Legacy, Dr, James Dobson, a psychologist who God has used to bless many families not only in America but also all over the world, defines legacy as faith in Jesus.  There is nothing that is more important than this, so this is what we must pass on to our children and others.  I cannot agree more.  Having said that I must also say that what we can do is simply to try because the fact is we cannot pass it on.  Faith is not something that we can pass on.

But there is something which we can pass on: being faithful.  Others and our children may not inherit our faith, but they can inherit our faithfulness, to be more specific, our faithful way of life.  We stick to something even though we don’t feel like doing it anymore, we do not run away when the going gets tough, we hang on even when no one is still hanging in there.  And that includes being faithful to God.   This is the legacy that we can pass on to our children: faithfulness.

There are a lot of things that I appreciate about my mother; one of them is her flexibility.  Even though she prepared food for us to eat but she would allow us, children, to call food vendors that passed by.  There was one in particular that we called a lot during dinner time: a pork satay man.  I still remember this middle-aged man, who stopped by our house every evening, carrying two carts of food on a wooden stick over his shoulder. I remember seeing his face beaming with joy whenever we said “yes” to him, when he stopped to offer his satay.  Every evening, he passed by, clear or rainy, liked it or not.

You who love plants or farming know something about faithfulness.  You water the plants, you make sure they get enough sun, and you do all that every day, not knowing when exactly they will grow. That is what faithfulness is all about: we do it, not knowing when it will grow into a legacy.  Faithfulness seeps into our soul gently, quietly.

Pastor Paul