What’s Left Behind

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about legacy…..about being intentional about what kind of heritage we leave for our children and for the people who will come after us. Some of that is because of a book I’ve been reading and a series we’re in at church. Some of that is because of these:

Cicadas. This year is a particularly bad one for cicadas here in the south, and we’ve had some extraordinarily noisy days lately as millions – literally, millions – of these little guys have emerged from the ground for the first time in 13 years. They camp out in the trees and do a little flutter dance with their wings, making a ridiculous amount of noise. Their festive celebration of freedom, though, is not the reason I connect them with my thinking about legacy. I do so because of their molted shells.

They leave them on the trees when they come out of hibernation, and most years, this is all we see. We hear their ruckus as they do what they do in the trees, but rarely do we actually see one of the bugs themselves. All we know is that they have been here, and we know they’re out there somewhere because we still hear them. They are kind of elusive, and because of that are almost mythical. Visitors from other regions of the country come, and we can’t show them a bug, but can say, “This is one of their shells…..and that sound is a bunch of them in the trees……” That’s all we can do to describe the weird little things. If they didn’t leave something behind, we’d have no idea what they were really like.

And that, friends, leads me to my thoughts on legacy. I, too, want to leave something behind. When I’m gone, be it from a room or from this life, I want those who are left to know what I was like….what I stood for….what was important to me. I want to raise my daughter in a home that teaches her who and Whose she is, in order to give her something to cling to when things get hard. I want her to have the truth of God so firmly embedded in her heart that there is no distinguishing where she ends and He begins. I want everything she experiences in this home as she grows up to lead her to the Lord…to the cross…to a place of worship and relationship with her Creator. As her mom, I have the power to do that. I can point her to eternal things, or I can point her to things that will fade.

These things, I am realizing, do not happen on their own, but through intentional, daily effort.

I’m still learning all that it means to lead her to Jesus. I’m still trying to figure out how to do it.

We sing songs about Him. She’s memorizing scripture. (Amazing to witness.) She knows who Jesus is and that He died on the cross because He loves her a lot. (She knows, too, that He woke up after He died.)

I’m teaching her, yes. Her head is learning, and I only hope that in so doing, I’m teaching her heart.

One day, she’ll be set free in this world, and mama won’t be there to walk her through her verses. One day, she’ll face things that are more difficult than I can bear to think of for my little girl. She’ll be out there on her own, and she’ll need a foundation that will stand firm when things get stormy.

My prayer – with everything I have in me – is that the Lord will have worked through me to equip her for life. My prayer is that somehow, her time here at home will never fade, but that it will go on forever in her heart and in her life as the eternal things we meditate on sink deeper and deeper into who she is.

My prayer is that my legacy will be one she’ll be proud of, and one that will launch her into the plans the Lord has for her.

We’ll all leave something behind when we’re gone. We leave something behind with the people we know…with every person we encounter. What will it be?