The Road to Tomorrow

Over the past decade Pete and I have been on a mission.  It's been in the background of our busy lives, perhaps not noticeable but there in our consciousness.  It's been a mission to organize and preserve our family history for those who come after us.  We've transcribed dozens of letters we wrote home during our years in Germany, chronicling our life there.  Pete has digitized hundreds of family photos and put them on CDs for each of the kids.  I've spent hours researching and documenting family genealogy, collecting and scanning photos to add to the dates and places.  We've spent thousands of dollars preserving the family farm and homestead instead of selling it off and letting someone else worry about it (or not, which is more likely what would have happened).  

I'm sure our kids have certainly wondered why in the world we bother about all this, why invest all this energy is something that doesn't really interest them.  The best answer I can give is to quote John McKay, former president of Princeton University who said, "The road to tomorrow leads through yesterday."  As we've gotten older, we've grown to appreciate much more the acts of God in our history.  We've come to understand that those places, people and deeds are not merely random acts of the universe but part of a larger story of redemption.  God doesn't act in the abstract - He acts in the concrete, the here and now, the there and then.  The pieces all have meaning because they are ordained by the One who is Meaning Himself.

Today so much of life is disposable, transferrable, temporary and ephemeral, measured and quantified in dollars and cents rather than in relationship and history and community.  People move around, in and out of situations like restless, vibrating, "independent", self-contained units, taking what they need from the immediate surroundings, often feeling no responsibility to or for those surroundings.  We've lost the bigger picture or, even worse, we've come to disbelieve that there IS a bigger picture.  And yet the question "Who am I?" still comes to haunt us in those rare quiet moments not filled with noise and distractions.  We've lost a collective sense of memory kept alive by community.  And with that amnesia, we've lost our identity, our sense of where we belong in this drama of life.  Contrary to current belief, our identity isn't something we forge entirely for ourselves in the here and now.  Our efforts to record and preserve have been efforts to keep telling the story, to keep the memories alive and to preserve the things that give identity in the larger framework of God's plan.  

Part of our desire is motivated by the knowledge that as children we often see people from a very limited perspective.  When I was a child, I saw my maternal grandmother as a quiet, plump woman with her hair in a bun who had rheumatism.  Many years later I was told stories about her from people who knew her as a younger woman.  One man told us that the one thing he remembered about her was her physical strength.  He saw her help my grandfather as he built a barn and she was able to carry sixty pound bags of concrete mix.  Another told me about her unique mechanical ability - she could fix just about anything that had a motor.  Neither of those were things I ever would have known or in my wildest dreams guessed about her.  My childish perspective, while not wrong, was certainly incomplete.  

In the history of a family there are things that happen that, as children, we can only guess at the reasons or draw conclusions that may be quite far from the truth.  Part of our desire in preserving the family history is to leave as clear a record (from our perspective) as we can.  Sue Grafton, in one of her mystery novels, says this:  Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten.  The memory is like orbiting twin stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

Of course our recollections are also distorted by our own perspectives.  But as far as we are able, we long to give glory to God for the threads He has used to weave this tapestry of our family.  And so we'll go on recording the story, as best we can.