Guest Author - BettyAnn Schmidt

A Faith Legacy

My bookshelves sag with the weight of volumes stuffed together like sardines in the can. Fiction titles, books on child rearing and special needs children, dictionaries, Bibles and Bible dictionaries, and lots of Christian nonfiction.

But the biggest selection is my collection of writing memoir and life stories.

When my Dad died with Alzheimer’s, I began searching our family history and studying books on the subject and putting the stories and pictures into my scrapbook. This became a project for my children and their children after them, passing down through the generations. I wanted them to realize how important faith was to our family and what a huge part it played in every area of our lives. I remembered all my little Catholic Grandma’s lessons that she taught me, and I want my grandchildren to know the lessons.

I want them also to know the hardships we endured and it was our faith in God that got us through. And so my Faith Legacy was born.

The one book that encouraged me most was A Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, wherein he says we are to have a life message for others, so I think that includes our children.

The book Legacy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Personal history, by Linda Spence is a good book because it’s walks you through each stage of your life journey, and asks questions throughout to keep your memory going. To Our Children’s Children by Bob Greene is a whole book full of questions to get your memories flowing. Writing from the Heart by Nancy Slonim Aronie is one of my favorites.

My ultimate favorite, though, is Your Life as Story, by Tristine Rainer, who not only teaches you how to write your life story but how to write. She gives you the story structure model that is well worn and true. If you scrapbook, I recommend Scrapbooking Your Family History, author Maureen Taylor. You will get many good ideas for your book there.

My Life Legacy is a work in progress that I continue to work on. Our kids need our words. They might forget some of the ones we speak to them, but they’ll have that bound legacy for a lifetime and even after.