A Generational Legacy

July Arts and Culture, Household Happenings, and the Importance of Generational Legacy

Welcome to this month’s Notes from the Fray! I have a little longer book section, no movies or television, and a shorter essay for you all this month. As you’ll see in the Household Happenings section, we moved this month, so my time was more limited than usual for writing a piece for this newsletter.

Regardless of length, I hope the content this month is helpful to you. As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments, and thank you for reading!

Photo by Norbert Tóth on Unsplash

Arts and Culture

A short section in which I describe the movies, books, etc. with which I engaged over the past month. This month, it’s just books and a little music.

Books

An Experiment in Criticism, by C.S. Lewis - This was a bucket book for me, a book I believed I should’ve read by now, but hadn’t. It took me several months to work all the way through it because I’m not as good at making time to sit down and read physical books as I should be. That said, this book was excellent. There are numerous concepts and phrases Lewis goes over that are stuck in my head and I find myself thinking about them regularly. I’ll definitely be revisiting this one.

Deep Comedy, by Peter J. Leithart - This book was a little over my head in places, but very good overall. Something Leithart mentioned offhand but that struck me was the idea that, because God is infinite, Christians could never reach a point where we can’t grow anymore. Even when we reach eternity, there will always be new things for us to do and learn because we will be growing in our knowledge and service of an infinite God.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, by Andrew Roberts - I heard this book (and biographer) recommended by Dr. George Grant in a Theology Pugcast episode (it was either this one or this one; I can’t find exactly where he says it but it was in one of those two episodes). The topic seemed interesting so I decided to borrow the audiobook through my library app. So far, I’ve only been in the sections talking about George’s early life, so most of the reputation adjustments have been addressing later comments made by British politicians, which I had never heard before. I’m assuming these are the kinds of things the British learn in school but, as I imagine is the case for most Americans, my knowledge of George III comes primarily from the perspective of the colonists in the late 1700s. I’m very interested to see what Roberts has to say about George’s role in the American War for Independence.

The Tech-Wise Family, by Andy Crouch - In my Goodreads review, I said, “A helpful book but not a must-read book,” which sums up my thoughts on this one. A lot of the practical suggestions were pretty good in this book, although the book seemed to me to lack conviction and came across as more of a list of suggestions that Crouch has found helpful, instead of convictions based on biblical principles. Positively, this book provides good and thought-provoking suggestions to get you thinking about how your family interacts with technology. That said, it’s not a book I’d recommend to everybody. There are plenty of people who are past this kind of interaction with tech. This book is a good introduction to these ideas, the kind of book I might have a high school student read as they begin to make some of these decisions on their own. For an adult, I’d want to get them reading some of C. R. Wiley’s books or Wendell Berry’s, The Unsettling of America: something meatier that gets to the root of some of these issues regarding households, work, and the effects of industrial and technological society on households.

Music

Westminster Shorter Catechism Songs with Brian Sauve, Questions 22-32 - If you are teaching your kids the Westminster Shorter Catechism, these albums are a huge help. Not yet knowing the catechism myself, they’ve been incredibly helpful as I try to learn it. Then, I can sing them with my wife and children as we learn and recite together.

Photo by nathan kosmak on Unsplash

Household Happenings

This last month was a whirlwind. We had two contracts fall through on our house and, thankfully, the third did not have any such issues. We were able to continue to move forward with our moving plans and have made it to Tennessee, where we’re staying with family until we get our own housing situation worked out.

The Lord provided a job for me here, which is a big blessing. While my goal is to move to teaching and freelance work primarily, this job provides for us during this season until the Lord opens those doors.

Getting packed was difficult, especially as this was our first out-of-state move with children (and, hopefully, our last). Timing closing on our house, leaving my job, finding a new job, and packing things while not making our lives unnecessarily difficult was a challenge. But, we took it as an opportunity to grow and learn to better keep a joyful countenance in the midst of less-than-convenient circumstances.

Our drive from OK to TN went smoothly and we were blessed by members of the church of which we plan to become members who came to help us unload our Uhaul. We had an appointment with the midwife who had been recommended to us and loved her. Time and again, the Lord has confirmed that the community we are getting plugged into here, at least as far as we can tell so far, is filled with people who are like-minded; not identical to us but who see the world the same way we do.

It has been a wonderful blessing to see my children get so much more time with my parents already, knowing that we will be close to them for the foreseeable future, as long as the Lord allows.

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

A Generational Work

A big motivation for our move out here to East Tennessee has been to be closer to family. While my wife’s family lives in Washington State, the cost of living there is prohibitive for us. To move there and continue to be a one-income household in our current phase of life isn’t currently possible, not to mention the increasingly dreadful trajectory of the Washington state government. There were a number of other factors, as well, but the primary reasons were these: I am the oldest of my parents’ children, and the only one with children of my own so far; my family has increasingly felt the value of having parents nearby, for many reasons; and, while I hope it is many, many years from now, I want to be close enough to my parents that, as they age, I and my family are able to take care of them.

All of this being the case, it seemed appropriate this month to revisit the theme of generational work and thinking. We hope to be here long enough that we can pass on to our children the work God allows us to do here in the community. We are all characters in a story that is moving toward the end God has planned. Our work, then, must be generational, since the work (or story) is bigger than any one individual or family’s lifetime could accomplish.

Households and Covenantal Inheritance

When we read Scripture, it trains us to think in terms of households, which are commanded to pass on the covenantal inheritance they’ve received. They are a means of furthering the story God has been telling since the beginning. Part of my job as a father is to ensure that my wife and I properly pass on our Christian cultural inheritance. In addition, our household has a function in the body of Christ that it’s uniquely gifted to perform. It’s my job to ensure that our household is doing that and then pass on that responsibility to my children so that they continue to serve the body of Christ. It will look different for their households than it does for mine, but we can trust that the Lord uses the work of a household to train children for their future roles in His body.

As we begin our lives here in this new place, we are aiming to begin projects and missions that will take longer than our lives to complete. We want to lay the foundation, then pass on these works to each of our children as they fit their own household’s goals and service to the kingdom of God. Hopefully, they will then do the same for their children, and so on to a thousand generations.

God’s Plan is Generational

This will be written for the generation to come, That a people yet to be created may praise the LORD. For He looked down from His holy height; From heaven the LORD gazed upon the earth, To hear the groaning of the prisoner, To set free those who were doomed to death, That [men] may tell of the name of the LORD in Zion And His praise in Jerusalem, When the peoples are gathered together, And the kingdoms, to serve the LORD.

Psalm 102:18-22 NASB95

God speaks generationally. His plan unfolds over time, with many different people over many different generations. Therefore, we should think and plan this way, too. This shift in thinking has been one of the biggest for me and my wife, when we stopped just thinking about how we could set ourselves up for a comfortable and stable life as we aged and started thinking more and more about our children’s children.

God had planted the seeds in our thinking several years ago through the content of Jeremy Pryor and the Family Teams podcast. The idea that we should be planning our finances, household culture, and general life aspirations with our descendants in mind was new to my wife and me when we first heard it in 2019. But I can see now the trajectory God had us on to bring us into a deeper understanding of what Scripture says it means to be a household. We’ve only scratched the surface of this generational idea and how it should affect our decisions. However, I am more convinced than ever that it is vitally important for us to recognize that the story we’re living is much bigger than ourselves and that God wants to use our households over generations as one means in His process of building His kingdom on earth.

Receiving and Leaving a Legacy

Part of thinking generationally is recognizing your legacy, both backward and forward. Not only do you have the responsibility to pass on a covenantally faithful legacy to your children and community, but you have received a covenantal legacy, as well.

If you were raised in a Christian home, then the legacy you received was, at least in part, a Christian one. If that was the case, then we should praise the Lord that He blessed us with that kind of legacy to receive; it will give us that much of a foundation to build on when we work to pass on that legacy to our children. While there is a good deal of correcting that goes on for most people, there are things we will never have to work through or deal with because they are second nature to us as a result of our parents’ work.

If you did not grow up in a Christian home but are a Christian now, your legacy is different. While you don’t have a direct faithful legacy to receive, you do have a legacy of being called out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light. As so many saints called out of darkness, God has called you to establish the first generation in a long line of generations faithful to God and who worship Him rightly.

In a broader sense, we are all also recipients of a much greater legacy, regardless of our direct ancestors’ faithfulness (or lack thereof). We are the heirs of Abraham, one generation in a long line of those who have been saved by grace through faith, brought out of darkness and into light. We are blessed by a long line of faithful ancestors in the faith who can inspire us and encourage us with their stories of great courage and faithfulness by God’s grace.

Ultimately, that is the legacy we are passing down. As Christians, we have received the legacy of God’s people down through the ages. From the creation, when God promised fallen Adam and Eve that He would send a seed that would crush the serpent’s head; down through the faithful in Israel as the creation waited for its savior; through the time of Christ and shortly thereafter, when He established His kingdom and many faithful brothers and sisters offered their lives to spread this good news of the reign of the King of Kings throughout the world; through Christendom in the Western World, when the gospel permeated society and much of the foundation we’ve relied on for centuries was laid; down to now, when God is continuing His work of building His church across the world, bringing His bride closer and closer to perfection, “that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless” (Eph 5:27 NASB95).