Previous Reflections
REFLECTIONS
February 3rd, 2025Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.
Deuteronomy 4:9
Your Life
Grandparents. God blessed me with mine. Perhaps that’s the reason I choose to say something about them rather than find their heirs looking at photographs wondering who they were. I remember such a feeling once while turning through an old album containing pictures of some likely ancestors, forever wondering where they fit into my family’s history. I’ll never know since their stories have been lost in memories long since passed away.
Inspired by my love and respect for the way God blessed me through my grandparents, I wrote about memories of them. I wrote about them because I wanted my heirs, and theirs to know the essence of who they were. It was my way of keeping them alive beyond their years on earth. And as I reflected on my project, I found my grandparents alive through the influence of the memories of those who know their stories. Like Mr. Bourland. I had scarcely noticed him tending to his wife’s burial plot adjacent to my grandfather’s until he looked up at me and said:
“I loved that man.”
*****
“I am a part of all I ever met,” the poet of Ulysses wrote. He reminds us that for as long as stories of someone stay in the minds and hearts of someone else, the influence of their lives carries on. Only it doesn’t end there.
Just as the character of my grandparents lives through stories of them, their influence continues, even in the life of someone else. And as equally profound—someday so will yours.
Your life makes a difference.
Live it well.
“You are the light of the world,”
Richard +
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