{"id":3511,"date":"2012-07-24T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T08:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doorposts.com\/blog\/?p=3511"},"modified":"2012-07-23T23:57:13","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T06:57:13","slug":"3511","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doorposts.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/24\/3511\/","title":{"rendered":"God’s Faithfulness Through the Generations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Last week I traveled back more than a hundred years as I sat in our dining room.<\/strong> I saw grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and lots of other people that I\u2019m somehow related to. My mother\u2019s cousin, Tom, had spent more than a year planning a family reunion, and I was helping organize a notebook full of family photos and history for the event.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Alice<\/strong>, who worked so hard <\/em>on her family\u2019s farm. She gave birth to eight children, but lost one at birth, one in her teens, and one in her thirties, and then lost her husband in a tragic incident. My mother gave me my Great-Grandma Alice\u2019s simple gold wedding band one Christmas. I loved wearing it. It flew off my hand during a water fight on the beach one fall, and I never found it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Hawley<\/strong>, one of Alice\u2019s five children who lived to old age, my hard-working, frugal, gentle, never-spoke-a-harsh-word- grandpa, who worked the farm in his youth, established his own business in his prime years, and devoted the last years of his life to quietly caring for his wife.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s his brother, Chet<\/strong>, who outlived three wives. He came a couple weeks short of celebrating his 100th<\/sup> birthday and died just one day before his little brother, my grandpa, died.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Robert <\/strong>who <\/strong>came <\/strong>from Scotland, and Phoebe<\/strong> who left North Dakota in her eighties to come to Oregon with her widowed daughter to claim land and start a new life.<\/p>\n

I was grateful as I sifted through old photos and family trees. I\u2019m a branch on a tree. Other branches and \u00a0roots \u2013 the lives of my ancestors \u2013 still nourish my branch and the new branches that grow from it. Their choices, their responses to the trials God brought into their lives, their work ethic and their courage \u2013 all those things have influenced my life in some way.<\/p>\n

I may not be able to measure it. I may not know most of their stories. But their lives, somehow, are part of mine. And my life is part of the lives of generations to come. What I do with my life will affect theirs. What I teach my children today will affect the lives of my great-grandchildren many years from now.<\/p>\n

And what a testimony to God\u2019s grace! <\/strong>In spite of the inevitable mistakes made by those who came before me, in spite of my own mistakes, God is still at work in our family. I can do my best, by His grace, and relax.<\/em> He is the one who planted this “tree” and continues to cause it to grow. He redeems our mistakes and turns them around for His glory and for our good. Thank God. He uses us, but it’s not all up to us!<\/p>\n

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