On a long airplane trip back from Johannesburg, South Africa in August, I was plagued with a question offered not only to me but to my wife as we were going down the highway to an early morning conference by a great new friend and colleague, Kudzai Shoko.

Perhaps, I should say Pastor Kudzai who was from Zimbabwe. He had been traveling with us for over two weeks as he will have a major role “forming a culture of fatherhood in Southern Africa countries in the years to come.” I found him extremely intellectual but having the innate ability to connect the heart and the soul and then communicating that. In fact, I must admit as we traveled and talked, I thought to myself, this guy really “gets fatherhood” and it took me nearly a lifetime of failed fatherhood experiences to really get what a good father is and to act upon those principles on a daily basis. So, he asked this really simple question, “What legacy are you going to leave your sons?” My wife and I looked at each other and I could respond with a few thoughts but then paused knowing I had not really formed the answer I wanted if my life ended on that highway. Sure, I could say and did say things like my values such as honor, hard work, servanthood, our ministry of fathering and sort of a list of “fluffy things.” At the end of the day, all those were correct but it didn’t feel just right to me. I found myself staring out the airplane window late that night remembering this funny smile on Kudzai’s face. After all, I was the guy coming to South Africa teaching Fatherhood! I sort of laughed to myself thinking for the past days my wife and I had been sharing our failures as a couple and me as a father and how we had “climbed out of terrible pit of anguish” and turned our family and marriage into something nice and here I am knowing my answers were really not the ones I wanted to provide. Darn it!

So, after several months of thinking about this and continuing my re-examination of my life as a father, a man, a husband, a son, an uncle, a grandson, I came up with some things for all of us to pause and consider in this Legacy question. But let’s get a good definition of what we are talking about when we say “legacy.” In historical terms, a legacy is something that is handed down from one period of time to another period of time. A historical legacy can be a positive thing or a negative thing. For example, the invention of the wheel (for carts, as a pottery wheel, as a grinding wheel to help turn grain into flour, and as an early water wheel) in Mesopotamia can be seen as something positive. The development of slavery is a negative legacy. Sometimes countries or civilizations can leave a legacy. In Athens, in Ancient Greece, people voted on their leaders. They created an early form of democracy. Greece, and later, Ancient Rome voted for their leaders for many generations.