Heritage

  This is a picture of my Grandfather, Sherman Logan Fuller.  I never knew him, he passed away twenty-three years before I was born.  My Dad was seventeen years old when his father passed away.  Sherman must have been a wonderful man, for he passed a rich heritage to his children.  Sherman and his wife, Amy, had nine children. One died at six months of age from scarlet fever.  Everyone of his children had nothing but wonderful things to say about him.  He was generous, kind, considerate, and helpful, always ready to lend a hand.  He loved to laugh and tell stories, and this he gave to my father.

He was a Christian man, from what I have been told, but came to faith as an older man.  He was one of 21 children.  His family had journeyed west in a covered wagon with others from Ohio, to plant a church in Illinois.   Sherman was born in the year the Civil War ended. His brother William fought in the Civil War and was with Sherman in Georgia.  Sherman would eventually move to live near his brother when William left to homestead in Nebraska.
When I asked my father and my Aunts about their Grandparents, they always talked about the faith and trust they had in Christ.

We don't inherit faith.  Faith, I think is a gift from God.  Families can nurture it, water it with the reading of scripture to their children, but they cannot give it to them, as they would give them food.  I was blessed to have a rich heritage of people who knew how to laugh, love, encourage, and pray. 
They knew how to parent. They took their children to church whether they wanted to go or not.  They not only had a Bible in the home, but they read it.  They taught their children the blessing of hard work.  These are things I think of when I read Proverbs 22:6, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." 

My great-grandfather Alexander Fuller, Sherman's Dad, might have felt disappointment when Sherman took spiritual things so lightly, but long after Alexander went to heaven, Sherman came to faith.  God's plan; God's timing; God's gift.  Christ planted the seed, Alexander watered it, and Sherman came to faith; not in the timing  perhaps that Alexander had expected, but in God's timing.

What heritage are we leaving our children?