Funny how one thing leads to another…I use a couple of
different resources each morning, the first of which is The Best of Andrew
Murray on Prayer – it is a devotional journal, with some of Murray’s writing, a
biblical passage, and space to write. This
morning I was challenge by these words, “The continuance of the morning watch
can be maintained by quiet self-restraint, by not giving the reins of our lives
over to our natural impulses.” I have followed my time in Murray with the very
simple Daily Bread and today the thought was on seeds and soil, and the
challenge was “What kind of soil am I?”
After reading, and sometime between reading, I spend time
praying, and I try to pay attention to the moving of the Spirit as I pray. This morning I believe the Spirit brought to
my mind family Bibles, and I wondered what was written in the ones I have downstairs
in the book case. I thought it was Jim’s
dad’s Bible, but I found that it was his mother’s Bible, given to her as a
child by her mother, nearly a hundred years ago. Back in those days, the only thing you wrote
in a Bible was family birth, marriage and death dates, and it was apparent that
she had added them over the next decades.
At first I was disappointed, as I had somehow hoped I would find Jim’s
dad’s Bible, and some great treasures of wisdom underlined, but I didn’t.
As I returned to my desk, I wondered what that was all
about; I believed I was following the Spirit’s guiding, and as I sat back down,
it occurred to me that maybe I was missing the point. God didn’t want me to look at Jim’s dad’s,
but his mother’s Bible. That Bible was given to Jim’s mom, a by her mother, who
loved God and wanted her daughter to know and love God as well. My mother-in-law, Lesta, told me that she had accepted Christ as her Savior at a tent
meeting when she was twelve, and her mother gave her this Bible for Christmas
not long after in 1918. God wanted me to
think about a woman’s legacy.
The legacy of those two women continues: Jim’s mom took her boys to church alone every
Sunday. In fact, Jim had perfect
attendance from birth to age 15. That
was the year she told my father-in-law that she wanted to go to church as a
family, and he told her the only church he would go to was a Baptist
Church. The next Sunday they attended
the Independent Baptist Church in Towanda, and it was there that I met my
husband, her son.
Lesta modeled hard work and godly living. She never taught a
class or led a ministry, but she would give you the shirt off your back if you
had need, and everyone knew that about her, a rich legacy. I’m sure she saw others around her who “had
more,” but she lived by quiet restraint.
Oh, she wasn’t perfect, but she was faithful.
This morning, I wonder two things, what will my legacy be,
and what about yours. What will we teach our daughters about loving our
husbands, about restraining our natural impulses, about being good soil so that
God’s Word grows the kind of fruit that is still visible after 100 years?
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