It all started innocently enough--I couldn't sleep, so I decided to organize the basement cedar chest--the one with the scrapbooks, memorabilia, and baby books. As I was sorting it all into piles--one pile for me, one for Alex, one for each of our children, and a big box for grandchildren's artwork--I came across some things I had not seen in a very long time. One of those items was a handwritten genealogy of my dad's family tree, all the way back to my great-great-grandpa: twelve pages of meticulously documented names, birth and death details, marriages, burial locations, even their professions and nicknames. I sat and stared at it, then began to study it, closely, until finally, I just had to plug all those names and dates and data into an actual family tree so I could see it all spread out in beautiful, magnificent flowchart fashion. Voila, problem solved with the discovery of an extremely user friendly program; I could plug in the data, and it automatically searches existing genealogical data and gives suggestions, sources, dates...in short, everything. After one night I had a family tree that, in some areas, extended all the way back to the 1700s. Mind boggling, seriously mind-boggling the amount, complexity, and detail of the data at our fingertips. A tad bid scary as well. All I did was type in the information of five generations in my dad's family tree, and suddenly, little blue boxes and notifications were popping up next to all the names on my family tree, telling me there were more sources, more data to digest and validate, more details, more, more, more, more. I was hooked, maniacally digging for more data, more dates, more names, trying to "complete" our family tree, but every time I thought I was finished, yep, more notifications, more little blinking blue boxes, being spit out by computers and the cloud and whatever else generates all this data stored in cyberspace. I would never be finished, some data was just too hard to find (like my husband's ancestors in Spain--I am convinced that Spanish surnames actually are a family tree in and of themselves).
So I stopped. And then it hit me. One day, 50, 100, or 150 years from now, one of my descendants would ask her grandma what it was like when she was a little girl, and her grandma would talk about life, share memories, and perhaps even show her a family tree with my name in a little white box six generations before the little girl was even born. What would the computer sources have spit out for my name? What little fun details would be listed? What stories could that grandma share about me with my future great-great-great-great-great-great to the nth degree granddaughter? What will I have accomplished, said, demonstrated, or lived that would leave a mark on the world, especially on that little girl's life? Will I be known as someone who loved and followed Jesus?
All those white boxes and lines on my chart, filled with names and dates and places where they lived--but that is all they are. Boxes, two-dimensional shapes on a screen. The living, breathing people who came before me made a difference, in their lives, their community, my grandparents' and parents' lives, and ultimately mine, because someone in my family tree told me about Jesus, about my heavenly Father, and because of that, I am now grafted onto the ultimate, eternal family tree.
Let that be my mission, my passion, my goal in life. Out of the box.
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