just enough light

These past couple of days I continued the process of throwing away dad’s stuff as I’ve been doing since his death over a year ago. Dad was a historian at heart. He loved to dig into the background of things, he documented events, and he saved the paperwork.

I just went through several notebooks that covered two areas of his life that he was particularly proud of, other than preaching. One was his mission work in St. Louis. Under the organizational name of Orbit, he established mission churches and several other services to underserved people in south St. Louis. He was both the visionary and the doer, the organizer and the laborer.

As I went through his Orbit notebooks, I read letters, mission statements, meeting minutes, task assignments, all the things that go with planning, organizing, and implementing a service organization. What he did was admirable by anyone’s standards. Now, 30 years later, some of those mission churches likely remain, but the organization and the connections to dad are gone.

The other area of his work was to head a committee to oversee Baptist organizations in Missouri, particularly colleges. Again, there were notebooks full of meeting notes, letters requesting information, letters praising his work, some criticizing his work, a decade’s worth of material.

All of that, once I flipped through to see what was there, got tossed in the trash can. I hesitated, had second thoughts, felt some pangs of guilt and sadness, but ultimately tossed them.

Few tangible things now remain of his work. His good work. His honorable work. What’s become clear to me is that we leave little behind once we die. Not only do we leave little behind, what we do leave behind has little to do with what we have worked so hard to accomplish and accumulate.

Most of what we leave behind has to do with the influence we have had on others, and that’s hard to trace. We influence our family, our friends, the people we work with, but in a short time, those influences no longer get attributed to us. Our influence goes on, but the connection gets lost.

I think of friends and loved ones, of former clients and colleagues, and I am grateful for the ways they have shaped me. However, I have forgotten a lot of names and faces and cannot identify the moments my life was altered because they crossed my path. I just know it happened, and I can only hope I have done the same for them, even after they have forgotten it was me.