I’ve always understood that what I’m living now, in my own house, with my own kids, is supposed to be handed down. What caught me this week, reading Exodus again, is that God didn’t stop the handing down at one generation.

Before the plagues even finish, God tells Moses plainly why any of this is happening. Not just so Pharaoh would let the people go. So that Moses could tell the story in the hearing of his son, and his grandson. Two generations named on purpose, in the middle of a crisis, before either of those grandsons existed.

I’ve thought, now and then, about what I want my own kids to carry. I don’t think I’d ever thought that far past them, to a grandchild I may not live to meet, and asked what they ought to be told. It’s a strange thing, planning for someone who isn’t real to you yet.

So this week I started something small. A plain notebook, nothing formal, where I’m writing down the ordinary places I’ve actually seen God work in this family. Not for my kids first. For whoever comes after them, who’ll only know any of it if someone wrote it down before they forgot.

Today’s Bible Study

The prophet Joel says something similar, and says it three generations deep. Tell it to your children, he says, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation. It reads almost like a relay, one runner handing off before dropping back himself. Nobody in that chain gets to see the whole race. Each one only has to pass along what was actually given to him, honestly, and trust the next runner to do the same with it. That’s a smaller job than I sometimes make it out to be. Not raising a saint. Just not losing what I was handed.

Recommended Reading

If you’re a grandparent, or hoping to be one someday, there’s a quiet little book called A Grandparent’s Gift of Memories: A Pilgrimage with the Saints, by Nancy Groves. It’s less something to read than something to actually fill in, built for exactly what I started doing this week, writing a few real memories and a little of your own faith down for someone who’ll want them later.