Legacy

To speak of missing persons
Tonight there's only one
And we all carry with us what the man's begun

As I get ready to travel to a memorial service for my Uncle Chuck, those Jackson Browne lyrics and the idea of legacy have been on my mind. When I look up legacy, the dictionary tells me a legacy is something handed down from the past. It actually refers to physical things that are left behind, but my uncle’s legacy has to be the things he left behind in the hearts of those who were graced with the privilege to have spent some time with him. I know my life is better for having spent a good bit of time with Uncle Chuck. And it wasn’t from the things he said so much, as he didn’t talk a lot. Rather it was the way he lived his life that left his mark on mine.

If you spent any time around Uncle Chuck much of it would have been spent helping somebody build something. He was a highly skilled carpenter and there was many a hot Saturday afternoon when he was leading a team of us “dummies”, which he jokingly called us unskilled laborers, as we all pitched in to put a new roof on the house of a friend or neighbor. But it was in those times that as a boy I learned, in part, what it meant to be a man of integrity. And again, it wasn’t from what Uncle Chuck said. It was the way he gently corrected an error. It was the way he jokingly chided you to learn something new. It was the fact that he didn’t quit until the job was done, including the clean up. It was through a hundred little moments of life that Uncle Chuck left a legacy to me.

And as I begin working to staff some continuing and some new ministries at my church, that idea of legacy is coming even more to the forefront. I have been in ministry for several years now, as a volunteer and as paid staff, but as I look back on those years, I think less of the things I have done and more of the people I have met. There is the young man, who now is in Special Forces training. I taught him some guitar early on and then played in a band with him. It was pretty cool that in a short visit he had at home from the service, he made the time to come to see me play at church and came back another night to hang out and jam with me. There was that group of young people in a fledgling teen band that we invited to join us on stage one time. And there was that little girl, a foster child rescued from a terrible abuse situation that I would sit with every time we played at her foster parent’s church. One day, she gave me a picture she made just because she knew I was coming.

I wonder if some of those moments, one day, will be a part of my legacy. It’s really hard to predict or even comprehend the impact you have on people, one way or the other, but I do know this for sure. Each of those people I met in ministry has left a legacy with me. That is to say whether or not I played a part in making their lives better, each one of them played a part in the betterment of mine. I still have the picture that poor abused little girl drew out of her gentle kindness. I still have memories of a thousand conversations, prayers, songs and smiles. And in reality, that is what ministry does. It creates legacies. Too often we think of ministry as doing a task to help the church, but in reality, ministry creates legacies. It leaves behind changed lives. It changes the lives we touch and it changes our lives in the process, probably ours even more than theirs.

So if someone asks you to help out with something that sounds like a ministry task, I urge you not to think solely about the task. Think instead about my Uncle Chuck and how being involved with him in a simple task made such a wonderful impact on my life. Think about how that little abused foster child looking for people to love her changed my life by loving me. And think about how Jesus loved us all, just by walking among us and by being the man and the God that He is. That is what He meant about being the salt of the earth. He meant that your life will flavor every life that you come into contact with. So if you are asked to help out at the church, don’t decide based on whether or not it is a task you will enjoy. Consider rather the lives you will be able to touch and how much more your life will be flavored by those you help, those you care for and those you care with.

Because that, I believe, is the real legacy.