Leaving A Legacy

On October 7^th, I shared with a small group of women in Hokes Bluff, Alabama. Their theme was “Leaving a Legacy”.  What follows is some of what I shared that weekend. I have added to it. You know how it is, hind sight is 20/20. You always think afterward of thing you should have said.

 What is a legacy?

Ø  A legacy:  something from the past: something that is handed down or remains from a previous generation or time.

As I began to think about leaving a legacy and ponder what that meant, I also began to think, who me? Who am I to think I could leave any kind of legacy for anyone?  Yes, I am a Christian and yes,  I love the Lord. I have been a nurse for a long time. I am a wife and a mother of one son. I think I have done a good job with all that, but to leave a legacy? And yes, my husband and I have left everything to serve Him as missionaries in Haiti. I consider that to be the least I can do for Him. After all, He gave His life for me on the cross, but for me to leave a legacy? Then the Lord took me to the book of Judges and began to talk to me about Gideon.

Ø  Judges 6:11-27 Gideon does not look like one you would expect to leave a legacy or do something important.

Ø  Threshed wheat in the winepress in order to hide from the Midianites. He was not brave.

Ø  His clan was the weakest in Manasseh; he was the least in his father’s house. Gideon was not important. At least not according to the world he lived in.

Ø  Was so uncertain he was hearing from God, he put out a fleece, not once, but twice.

Ø  When God told him to tear down an altar to his father’s false god and build an altar to the Lord on top of it and sacrifice to God there. But he was still so afraid; he did it at night so no one would see him.

To me, leaving a legacy means something grand! It means you are going to be remembered long after you leave this earth! You have done amazing things! You have to be an awesome person! Me, I am no different than anyone else. I am the same as you are. But the Lord was telling me that I don’t have to be “special” to leave something for the next generation.  I just have to be obedient. Gideon, in spite of all his insecurity and fear, is remembered today because he was obedient! The Word began to come alive as I thought about all the others in scripture who have left us a legacy of obedience and trust in the Lord, some whose names we do not even know.

Ø  Moses; he argued with God that he was not able to lead the Israelites out of Egypt because he stuttered.

Ø  Ruth; A Moabite woman who cared for her Israelite mother-in-law and served her God and was included in the lineage of the Messiah.

Ø  The Shunammite Woman; she honored the man of God Elisha, with food and a place to sleep.

Ø  Esther; she was put in a position, really against her will, that enabled her to keep the Israelites from destruction.

Ø  The boy with the five loaves of bread and two fishes.

Ø  The Syro-Phoenician woman who persisted in asking Jesus for her daughters healing.

Ø  The Widow who put two pennies in the offering.

The list goes on and on. There many others we could talk about from the last century or so.

Ø  Suzanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley;

Ø  Lottie Moon missionary to China;

Ø  Annie Armstrong, helped establish the Woman’s Missionary Union

Ø  Mary Moffat-Wife of Robert Moffat, pioneer missionary to South Africa

Ø  Fanny Crosby- Writer of many hymns (Blessed Assurance), was blind

This list could go on and on as well. I do want to tell you about two women of our time. Marguerite Howard is a woman in her eighties who exudes everything I grew up thinking a lady should be. She is the daughter of missionaries. She was born and raised in India until she was 14. At that time during WW2, her family was forced to leave India due to the war. God told her she would go back as a missionary to India. She told him no. She argued that she was not missionary material. At the age of 16 she finally told the Lord she would give Him her availability since she had no ability. She and her husband Hobart have just retired after 60 years of service in India!  Indian children, whom she and her husband took into their home, are now leading the IPHC work in India. And they are still planning to travel to and from India as they are lead by the Lord.  

Joy Bausum was 26 years old and had been in Malaysia at an orphanage for only 2 weeks last year when a blood vessel in her brain ruptured. She was taken to the best medical facility in India.  She died several days later.  I had met Joy in May of last year at a cross cultural class Roger and I had to take.  I have never seen a young person so in love with Jesus! She had given her life to Jesus at a very young age. At 16 she started going on mission trips that she raised the money for herself. She never attended college. She was not rich. She just loved Jesus. By the time she died she had served Him in over 20 countries including the United States. She was going to be partnering with another young woman at the orphanage in Malaysia when the Lord called her home.

My husband went on his first short term mission trip to Cuba in 2001, right after September 11. He came home telling me we were going to the mission field full time. Yah right! You know what I told him? You’re crazy!  But this began a series of mission trips, which I actually became a part of in 2004, that took the Johnsons to several Central American countries.

And about that trip in 2004; be careful what you pray. God just loves to give us what we want. Before I left working in a hospital setting, I burnt out. I did not like me or anyone else. I don’t think any one else liked me either. I know my husband and son didn’t. So I prayed. I prayed for the Lord to let me be the kind of nurse He wanted me to be, and to nurse His way. Well, in 1997 I left working for the hospital and went to home health for 3 months, then got a call about working for Dr. Castillo. My dream job, I love cancer patients, always have my whole nursing career. This was it. I could now nurse the way God wanted me to. Then my first medical mission trip in 2004, to Yoro, Honduras, in the mountains, under a canvas tent. Dirty, hot, chickens running through the tent where the clinic was and people with nothing. I dug rocks out of the head of a little boy who had fallen out of the back of a pick up truck going to school. Thank God for Lidocaine! He was knocked unconscious and was not very lucid when they brought him into the clinic. I am NOT AN ER NURSE. READ MY LIPS! I AM NOT AN ER NURSE! I tried to clean wax out of the ear of a little girl, who we realized, the more info we got from the mother, had her eardrum rupture the night before. When we looked with the otoscope, it was not there.  I am a nurse but I had no clue what I was doing! Fortunately, there was an experienced missionary nurse with us who helped me, consoled me and encouraged me that even the little I could do was making a difference in these lives. And at the end of the trip God reminded me of what I had prayed so many years ago that I thought I had already received the answer to. I heard a still small voice deep in my heart, not audible, but still heard, “this is the nursing I want you to do”                                               

I tell you all this to let you know that it really is not about leaving a legacy. It is about being obedient to what the Lord has put in your heart to do. Not one of these people really gave thought as to how they would be remembered. Jesus was their primary focus.

Leave a legacy of obedience to Jesus Christ and the cross!