Tell your family’s faith story
By Ruth Schenk | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
God is writing a story with your life right now.
It has the drama of good and bad choices, moments of victory and defeat, times of disappointment and rejoicing.
Stories are powerful communication tools.
They tell where we’ve been and where we’re going. Before days of television, stories were front-porch entertainment.
My kids and grandkids love our family stories. There’s the one about “Bop” racing his Camaro, about the time he put his braces through his lip while playing basketball, about
the time Grandad almost backed his car through the garage door and the time they almost blew up the neighborhood burning leaves.
But one story trumps them all.
It’s the story that changed our lives and set the stage for generations. It’s about our inheritance of faith. The characters in the story are gone, but we passed it on to our children
and grandchildren.
My father was 9 years old in 1924, living in a household of alcoholics when he first heard about Jesus. The last seven years had been a fight for survival since his father died at
age 32 of typhoid fever on a warm summer night. No one expected it—least of all my grandmother, who was just 22, caring for two young sons still in diapers. My grandfather
owned a furniture store in Decatur, Ill. He had lots of merchandise but very little cash.
After burying my grandfather in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the local cemetery, my grandmother moved into a bedroom in her parents’ home in Detroit.
It was a necessary, but not ideal, arrangement. The men in the house drank heavily, shifting from one job to another, drowning their troubles around the card table at night. My
father told stories of selling newspapers before school.
Family life was difficult but relatively uneventful until a visit from Uncle Greg, a sheriff from North Dakota, and his wife. Everyone wanted to hear crime-fighting adventure sagas,
but Uncle Greg had come on a mission. He’d found Jesus, turned his life around, and began to travel and tell others about it. The hard-living, lost relatives in Detroit were his
first stop on the salvation trail.
My great-grandfather listened along with the rest of the family—altogether there were 10 adults and five children. According to the story, Uncle Greg did not push too hard. He just
told his story of finding Jesus as if it were the only thing that mattered and time was short.
He stayed a few weeks at the rambling house on an alley. When Uncle Greg saw billboards advertising a revival with George Bennard, writer of “The Old Rugged Cross,” he
asked the members of the household to go to the meetings with him. They couldn’t find the words to turn him down and took up more than one pew in the little downtown
church night after night.
On Thursday, two of my father’s uncles went forward during the invitation. Friday night, three more went forward, along with my father and his brother. The last night of the revival,
my great-grandfather, the patriarch of this needy clan went forward to give his life to Christ. And he was never the same. None of them were.
Things in that house on the alley changed after that. One Sunday, the whole group put on suits and white carnations for their baptisms. My grandmother was so grateful for what
God had done that she fretted about finding a thank offering. Since the only thing she still owned of value was her wedding ring, her only remnant from happier days, she
dropped it in the offering plate during services one night.
Even as a young man, my father began a life dedicated to sharing Christ with everyone who crossed his path, especially those who struggled. He never bypassed someone
who was ill, someone needing help with a broken-down car, those who needed a meal or a few dollars to get by. Though his wallet was thin, his heart was huge. Most of his life
was spent shepherding a small, inner-city congregation of foreign students in downtown Detroit.
Not long after Greg went back to being a sheriff in North Dakota, his appendix burst. He died a young man. My great-grandfather also lived only a few months after he became a
Christian.
“Wish I’d done it sooner,” he said in his last days.
Some of my father’s uncles continued to battle alcohol and died far too young.
The salvation story of our family tells our history clearer than any photo album or family tree.
In a family tradition as sure as the Easter egg hunt after dinner on Easter Sunday, the story is still handed down one generation to another. So far, Uncle Greg’s visit has made
all the difference to five generations who followed, including my children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
Everyone who knows Christ has a faith story with its own drama of being lost, then found. Each harbors remnants of failure and loss, hope and redemption. And each one
should be the fabric of our message to succeeding generations, handed from one life to another, as surely as a baton in a relay race.