It’s never too late to change your legacy. The unhealthy environment you were brought up in or the one that has been the norm in your family doesn’t have to continue. You can be the beginning of your family looking different for you AND the next generation. God revealed this to me in a powerful way.

 

It was a Sunday morning that I knew our small church was going to have someone share a short testimony of what being raised in the church had looked like in her life. I knew her, her husband, her parents and her children. I have to admit I was dreading listening to what I wished my life had looked like. I knew she had trials and that life had not always been peaches and cream, but still I longed for the spiritual foundation and childhood stability I could only imagine she would share. It was as painful to listen to as I expected. I listened as she shared how involved her parents had been at each church and camp and the pivotal people that had fed into her life. I felt so defeated, like I had started out from the beginning in a deficit. Then things took a turn and she started sharing about how her parents had made the decision to go to church and raise herself and her siblings in the church. I knew this, but somehow in my distracted brain it had never clicked. Her parents were the change to their family’s legacy.

 

CLICK!

 

I am also impacting MY family’s legacy. Things in my children’s lives, maybe my step children’s lives, and hopefully my grandchildren’s lives doesn’t have to look how my life looked. I can’t change the environment I was raised in and I can’t change the trials that my own children have gone through due to divorce and mental illness within the family. I can’t change the things that have trickled into my children’s lives as a result of the unhealthy environment I was raised in. The past is history, but I can be mindful of the present and impactful to the future. What I do right now matters, it has impact to those around me, my children and possibly the generations to come. You see the person giving the testimony is married to an elder in our church and her brother is now a pastor of another church. The choices her parent’s made changed the trajectory of their legacy.

 

Perhaps my choices could have such a profound legacy also. I am in the teenage years with my children and a lot of days in our culture I feel like I am in the trenches fighting for the hope that they will leave our home with a strong Christian foundation, but I am fighting and praying hard. God showed me that I am powerful in their lives and there is no place for defeat in this scenario. As a mom, I sometimes wish that I could have prevented all the hurts in their lives, but then God gives me glimpses of how those hurts have strengthened them and made them wise beyond their years. They have walked away from unhealthy relationships and established boundaries that I didn’t figure out until I was in my late thirties. God uses all of it for His glory.

 

Please be encouraged. If your childhood or even adulthood hasn’t looked like you wished, you are still breathing which means you are still here for a purpose. You can change the legacy of your family, your neighborhood, etc. Wouldn’t it be something for people to look back at where God’s light shone through and see that God used YOU! He chose you to be that difference in your environment. If you are still breathing, then it is never too late.

 

PSALM 78:4-8 “We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done. He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands. They would not be like their ancestors—a stubborn and rebellious generation, whose hearts were not loyal to God, whose spirits were not faithful to him.”