From One Generation to the Next

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

Frankin Delano Roosevelt

It’s been more than eight weeks since I last posted on this blog. Between the last post and this one, I spent four weeks in Slovakia. The trip to Slovakia was my first time back in thirteen years and fourteen years since we, Joe Ann and I, moved back to the U.S.

I planned the trip because I had finished my memoir of our time there and I wanted to thank those Slovaks who partnered with us for twelve years and see what had happened in the lives of those we knew and loved over these intervening years.

Several days after returning to Michigan, I attended an afternoon reunion with more than half of my living cousins on my dad’s side of the family. The cousins are the children of five out of nine siblings, none of whom are living today. They came from Western Canada, Washington, and North Carolina, as well as several cities in Michigan, to spend a few hours together.

I am still processing the many experiences in Slovakia, but it is what I saw and heard that was similar to my time with cousins that has prompted my reflections today. The cousins attending the reunion are in a close age range to one another, and all of us spent some of the most significant years of our lives in the same church. I couldn’t help but notice how the legacy of family and church shaped our lives, was prominent in our memories, and seemed to direct so much of our conversation.

Time flew by too quickly, and we were reluctant to part ways. I left, feeling warmly enveloped in a soft, comforting blanket of familiarity. It made me realize how fortunate we are to possess what was bestowed upon us many years ago, a rarity in itself. However, out of the five families of aunts and uncles represented at the reunion, there was not a single family in which we grew up where the children, upon becoming adults, stayed in the same city and church. We moved into our different worlds.

Our biographies in our formative years intersected history at different times than our parents’, and our children’s lives are intersecting history in times we could never have imagined. Our parents could not construct our future any more than we can build the future for our children or grandchildren. Yet we had some of the same tools to help build a solid foundation for them. Growing up in families with two parents who love the Lord, being active and supported in a community of faith, is a major part of that foundation.

During my time in Slovakia, and particularly my visit to the church in Banská Bystrica, I felt immense gratitude and joy in witnessing the same legacy of faith and family passed from grandparents, who are my age or a little younger, to their children – now grown with children of their own – and to their grandchildren. The worlds of each of the generations have changed greatly as they have moved from under a totalitarian government and Marxist economy to a different system of government and economy. While I witnessed many visible changes, I saw what was most important in the church. Because they know the unchanging Jesus, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, each generation is prepared to meet their own time in a changing world.

I see and know that there are many from every generation among us who do not possess the same legacy as I and many of my family have been blessed with. Yet, as members within the larger family of God, we have the opportunity to invest in and help build a legacy for others and their children. May we all share the richness of our experience with those whose lives we touch.