A lesson from an unlikely source.

In a conversation with a friend recently, the conversation of insects came up. He was wearing a necklace with a 1+" beetle suspended in clear epoxy. It sounds strange, but really matched his shirt, personality & history. He grew up in Madagascar and then went back with his wife and kids as missionaries and as you can imagine, he has stories that are a combination of fascinating, strange & altogether alien to this Minnesota home-town girl. So we talked about bugs and I now know how the hissing cockroach got it's name and the difference between it and a regular cockroach. Ewww!

And then the topic of lice came up. (Do you feel crawly yet? I do! ) Almost everyone in Madagascar has lice. In fact, it has become part of their culture to have lice. When a baby is born it is the grandmother's honor & privilege to take a louse from her head and place it on the head of the infant to begin their very own lice colony. Boys often get their head shaved in the summer - and they leave a patch of hair at the front of the head for the lice to live, calling it the equivalent of a lice house. They won't get rid of all the hair because the lice is something that has been passed on to them from multiple generations, which has a high value in their culture. (Now I feel like I want to jump in the shower.)

I have a filter that kicks in fairly often asking how I can apply this story to my life, and I don't really want to apply anything that has to do with lice to my life, AT ALL. But part of me longs for a legacy, something I can pass on to my children, something of a torch that I can carry forward, run hard with, and hand off to the next generation. So I find myself evaluating what exactly I am passing on to our kids, what type of role model am I being, what are the things I want to make sure I am passing down? What are the bits and pieces that I have received that are important enough, good enough, worthy enough for the next generation?

I know I will fall, I will fail. But will my kids be able to see that my hope in God sustains me? Will they see the Holy Spirit's healing in my life? Will His grace, that is sufficient for me, really be enough? Can I possibly model Jesus to them? Will they put their hope in the Living God? And will they be able to pass it on to their children, and their children's children...

Because here's a true statement that scares the crap out of me:

Children are unpredictable.
You never know what inconsistency they are going to catch you in next.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

They are watching us, and they are making life decisions based on what we do and what they see.
And that's a BIG DEAL.