Reflective Life - Leaving a Legacy

The passenger driver side window of my car is covered in fingerprints from, you guessed it, my three year old boy. He knows how to make an impression in so many ways and in this case its using his fingers to mark up my windows. It got me thinking about the marks we leave in life. We all leave our own fingerprints on the lives of the people around us and on the world we live in. The thing is we don't get to chose if we leave a mark, just the type of mark we leave. I don't know about you, but when I think about the word legacy, it brings with it a positive connotation, but that isn't true always true. A legacy by definition is "anything handed down from the past..." which means that a legacy includes the negative stuff too.

I was watching a preview for a show about World War 2 and I just pondered the thought, "Hitler left a legacy." Honestly, I would rather leave little positive legacy than the bombshell negative legacy that someone like Hitler left. When you think about the domino affect of Hitler's choices on the world as a whole its a scary image. A few years ago, I watched a video of the Germans who walked through a death camp at the end of World War 2. They were in horror of what had happened there. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, well this video made the word count rival that of the number of stars in our universe. The Germans did not have a picture of what Hitler was doing to the Jews and those with special needs (and the list goes on) until it was over and they saw the aftermath.

Our actions have weight. How we interact with our own lives matters. I recently heard Francis Chan in a video entitled, "Rethinking Church" compare people in church as one goes to the movies verses going to the gym. One is an onlooker being entertained and the other a participant interacting in her environment. As I have delved into this thought, it occurred to me that this comparison also works for life in general. How many of us live our lives in a passive manner, just dealing with whatever crosses our path? We live as if we are in a movie theatre taking whatever the screen of live throws at us or being a victim being crushed under the daily assault of bad deals, put downs and devaluing interactions. What if we took more ownership of our lives, what if we looked at our life as a gym, building ourselves up, starting where we are? Our legacy isn't about being some great person, its about taking what we have and building on it. To do so we have to start where we are. Often we are too scared to take a deep look in our lives to even see where we stand and therefore don't have the tools to move forward.

Hitler wasn't a bad person because he was born evil. Hitler was a person that faced the hardship of life and allowed it to mold him into a man capable of massacre and cruelty. Had he instead taken control of his life and chosen to be better himself, he may have left a better legacy just as impactful but for the good of humanity. So what will your legacy be? Will you live your life in a passive manner or take control of what you can, face the reality of where you are and seek to be someone that can leave a fingerprint that will help bring healing into the world? The choice is yours. I choose to leave a legacy of healing and love.