Conversation Point

In This Moment

Photographs and Legacies

My mother has begun to trust me with the care of family heirlooms.

A promised sweater arrived last week nestled around a cut crystal vase from her own mother. The sweater was a belated birthday gift hand knit for me, but the vase was something she had held in trust until the time was right.

Some old family photographs had been sent several years earlier, a number of them more than eighty years old, opening the door to a world that is still at a distance and out of focus for me. The pictures presented a lineage of the women of the family I had never met and about whom I had heard very few stories. Relying on the photographs themselves, and the few reference notes my mother had jotted on the back of each print, I approached each woman in turn and tried to say my hellos and introduce myself.

Each woman, from Grandma Clara to Great Grandma Consuela to Great Great Grandma Mills faced the camera directly, smiling broadly with sparkling eyes. Vintage clothing and cars, old-style buildings and dirt roads as backdrops didn't seem foreign or out of place as we began to get to know each other. One picture, of Great Great Grandma Mills, showed her in the middle of a prairie landscape, a breeze blowing her ankle-length dress and apron as if she had just finished a fervently good twirl. She is laughing, this pioneer prairie woman who I resemble so much. These women, who have long since passed on, are a part of me, and I am a part of them, even though we never knew each other. I feel a sense of longing, as if it is still possible, to find a way to the homes they made, to share a conversation with them over tea or coffee and a fresh homemade cookie. I also feel a responsibility to make sure they are not forgotten in how I tend to my own life, what I will pass on to the people who come after me.

I feel this same longing as I read through the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the chapter which begins, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Although we have no pictures of these Biblical people, the unknown author of Hebrews goes on to talk about our faith legacy and who has carried it before us. Some pretty big names are featured: Abraham, Sarah, Abel, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses. And for every celebrity whose name made the cut, there are countless others who each contributed to what our generation of believers will pass on to the next.

With these, as with my grandmas, I would like to know what crossed their minds at sunset in the wilderness of the desert and the desolate frontier prairie of Minnesota and North Dakota. What were their hopes and dreams, what gave them peace at night as they laid their heads down to sleep? What gave them strength enough to get up, get moving and face the day?

For these well-known and unknown people of faith who have preceded us, I believe it was their faith that settled their souls at night and roused them again each morning What stories I do have for these faces in front of me center on their faith and their lively spirits. The combination makes me smile, as does the reality that they also knew the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Abel, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses. We share a connection in our faith, even though we are generations apart. More than a connection, their faith has been handed down as a legacy to me as surely as the cut crystal vase.

Until next time, God's blessings.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 4:34 PM