Legacy: some thoughts on what we leave behind

Legacy is the footprint we leave behind

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove... but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.

                                                   Forest E. Witcraft teacher, scholar

The Winter 2016 Courageous Living class just wrapped up at the Barron County Justice Center (or JC for short) this past Friday. What started as a 15-member class six weeks ago concluded with three “graduates” (but only two could make the final class). Some of the attrition came because of matriculation – they either got released from jail or the prison bus picked them up for the next leg of their personal journey. A few, unfortunately, were excused from the class for disciplinary reasons. But three guys chose to take “the Resolution” made popular by the Kendrick brothers' film Courageous.

Several years ago after making more than a few attempts to introduce Alpha!, a 13-week Christianity 101 course, to the JC, I asked the former Director of Inmate Services what she thought was the greatest need of the inmates at the Barron County Jail. Without blinking an eye she simply said, “fathers.” I have been a volunteer chaplain at the JC since the place opened up in 2004 and in all the one-on-ones I have conducted over that time I can say with reasonable certainty that over 90% of the guys I have met with either don't know who their dad is or don't want to know their dad or are vaguely aware that he is in the system somewhere. The 2011 film put out by the same church who produced Facing the Giants and Fireproof is all about dads becoming the fathers God calls them to be. When I suggested the six-week class based on the movie she said “yes” and we were in like Flynn.

The format of the class is fairly simple. In the first session we watch the movie. Over the next four weeks we have a Bible study based on four different Scriptures in Joshua that have to do with calling, priorities, legacy and faith. In the final class, those who are willing have an opportunity to make the Resolution. While I stress repeatedly that it is not necessary that they do so seeing that the matter is between them and God, more often than not the guys who are left stand, raise their right hand and repeat after me:

It's something akin to a sacred vow.

During the class on legacy, I share with them a story from my family's history. It's a story that is nearly 150 years old but it has been passed down generation to generation up until the present day. I wish it was something that I could brag about but it's not that kind of story. It's a sad one and it goes like this:

Not him but he served with him

My second-great-grandfather, James Martin, fought in the Civil War. He volunteered in 1862 when he was 18 years old and marched off to war with the 15^th Iowa Volunteers. Over the next couple of years he was at the seige of Vicksburg in 1863 where, like a lot of men involved there, he spent some time in the hospital on account of malaria. In 1864 he was in Georgia in the lesser known battle of Kennesaw Mountain. According to his military record, during that conflict while on picket duty – during the Civil War, pickets were the first guys sent out to feel where the enemy was and subsequently were the first to be killed, wounded or captured - he was shot in the left arm. Like so many other guys of that time to be shot with a 50 caliber bullet in any of your limbs usually meant you lost it to amputation as he did. The rest of the war he spent in a Union medical camp recovering from that wound.

Returning to civilian life is hard

He came home to Oskaloosa, Iowa following the war and somehow or other ended up marrying a Quaker girl, starting a family and farming a small plot of ground. They soon added a daughter and two sons, my great-grandfather being the baby of the family. The 1870 Census of Mahaska County shows that her mother was living with them at the time suggesting that she was either sickly or needed help with the children. Something more was amiss than just her health, though. While I actually know a one-armed farmer and can personally vouch that his apparent disability has not slowed him down a whit, maybe farming in the days before everything was automated was just way too much. Maybe he drank too much. Or maybe he was just a loser. Whatever the case a day came that lives in infamy in our family. It was the day he walked out on his wife and kids and rode away forever. To her dying day, his daughter – Cora – who lived to see the Kennedy administration with all her faculties about her – believed that regardless of whatever else was wrong with her mother she had died of a broken heart. 

After her death, the children were all split up. Not even the grandma who was living in the home at the time took Cora in. She got sent to live with James' older brother, George and his family where she was unkindly treated and the two boys were taken in by different neighboring families. In time, all of them overcame, grew up and raised families of their own but that kind of trauma leaves an indelible mark.

Cora told this story to her daughter, Veryl, who in turn told it to her daughter, Alice, who passed it on to her daughter, Carol, a sad inheritance of desertion and betrayal. It was Alice who told the story first to me by sharing an excerpt from a letter that her mother shared with another relative:

“My mother said that her father James Madison ran off with another woman and that she and the two boys grabbed him around the knees and begged him not to go but he shook them off and went. She was around five then. She said her mother grieved herself to death and died of a broken heart.”

You know when we glibly say about a matter, “A hundred years from now who will even remember...”? well, this particular story is now a 145 years old in the telling and it's still being told. Talk about legacy. 

I don't know what kind of soldier my great-great grandfather was. Going by his army record, he was an average soldier who more or less did his job and stayed out of the stockade. That being said every soldier knows you never leave your post. It's a capital offense if you do (think of the trouble that Sgt. Beau Bergdahl is presently in for walking away from his while in Afghanistan!) But James deserted his.

He married the woman he had taken up with and they moved up the Mississippi eventually settling in Minneapolis where he worked on the railroad. When he died a little over ten years later, the GAR buried him and interred his body in what is now the Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldier Memorial Cemetery. Only his second wife, who was later buried in a pauper's field, was left to mourn him.

I tell that story to remind them that contrary to all that talk about kids being resilient (and they are) they each have remarkable potential to endow their kids with a legacy that releases blessing into their lives or perpetuates a family curse.

Patricia with her dad on her wedding day

I also share an excerpt from another letter. This was one was written far more recently by a young woman whose father died unexpectedly a few years ago from a heart attack. Jeff was a part of our fellowship, had served in missions for over twenty years and in the years preceding his death had been subbing fairly regularly in surrounding school districts. He had a healthy relationship with his wife and kids and his sudden death was quite a shock to all of us. At her Facebook page, his only daughter, Patricia, posted a letter to her dad:

While life is a vapor, eternity will last forever. I know I will spend my eternity with Jesus, my Dad, my baby brother Wayne, and many who have gone before and after them. I can only hope that my life on earth will be a testimony for Jesus and that others will find that peace and hope that only Jesus can give. Because everything else will fade away. We live life to the fullest, we love others as Jesus calls us to, we pursue truth in everything we do. And, we weep because we miss the ones that pass on to something greater. 

But we don't have to forget. We don't have to think we are alone. We don't have to say a permanent goodbye. We simply ask God to give us the grace, strength, and peace we need to live life to the fullest while we wait (some more patiently than others) to be reunited with Jesus and the ones we love already with Him.

I love you Pops. I am honored to be your daughter. I am so proud of the traits and passions I inherited from you. I will always smile when someone says that I am like you. I will always be thankful for the years on earth we had together - for the things you taught me. To be a person who puts God first. To stand up for truth no matter the cost. To love the Word of God. For our countless amazing memories together...and one day we will make more. I don't know when but I know we will. 

So Pops, Until the day we meet again.

Jeff didn't leave his kids a lot of money (if any at all). But he left them a legacy, an example to follow, a story to tell to their kids one day of their Grandpa who did his best to love his God and his family heart and soul. I hope one day that one of my kids will say the same of me when my life is over. I don't want to live on in infamy to generations of Martins yet to be born. In our family we've already had enough of that.