Posterity

It is 2-22-22. This fun date/number sequence has not happened in a hundred years. On that day, a woman in what is now Fort McClellan, Alabama, a sharecropper’s wife, was beginning to suspect that she was going to soon bear her 10th child. She would have been sad to know that this little boy would grow up to travel around the world in a military endeavor designed to stop a holocaust. She would have been happy to know that all her boys and girls would put on Christ in baptism. She would have been so glad to know that all 14 of her direct adult descendants through this unborn boy would be in the greatest kingdom in 2022,  and that 7 little children a hundred years later would be on the trajectory of heaven. I’m thankful that, through his new mercies on each of the 36,500 mornings between the two 2-22-22 dates, this grandmother’s  arms were around me many times. I’m glad the generations often touch to the third and fourth in a line. On that 2-22-22 date, there was another woman who was yet seven years away from bearing her only girl child to survive childbirth. This little girl was not born into a Christian home. But someone came to that household and shared the gospel. From that simple sharing, and in that 100 year lapse, came ( to my best count) nine elders and 13 ministers/preachers of the gospel. In the raising of the little boy born in ‘22 and in the sharing of the gospel in the little girl’s house, nobody thought they were doing profound things. While, relatively speaking, human beings don’t do profound things, still, when we humbly strive to do His will in our homes and in sharing the good news, God provides (there’s providence) an increase that’s just beyond our small scope of expectation or even our mental acumen.  One of those women was so busy picking the cotton, making the biscuits and gravy, trying to feed a family of twelve, hand-washing their overalls and building the fires to keep that house warm, that she didn’t think a lot about the scores of souls, like me, who would be influenced by her choices. The other, on 2-22-22 was desperately trying to put her life back together, with three small children, after an unfaithful husband had walked away multiple times. I’m glad she persevered, listened to the glad tidings and, eventually married my grandfather.  She surely did not have any idea about the 9 elders and 13 ministers. She didn’t even know the little boy at Fort McClellan who would marry the little girl she would bear in her second marriage. She didn’t know that, while she was sometimes wondering about the source of her next meal, God knew that two of her sons, who wore patched coveralls and often ate just cornbread and milk, would grow up to desire and share in their pulpits the sincere milk of the Word. She did not know those two little boys would baptize hundreds. But God knew. God knows about you, too. He can take the toughest, darkest times of your life and make something good for His kingdom. It could be, that on the next 2-22-22, your posterity may have brought many souls to glory. Right now, you are just busy feeding, nurturing and loving on your children and sharing the good news as you walk through simple doors He opens. You could be struggling through unfaithfulness in your marriage, persecution, poverty or betrayal . But your influence may be profoundly outdoing the mundane choices for good that you are making. He can make so much glory when his people just do the next right thing.