Do you know the first names of any of your great-grandparents? Unless one of your hobbies is genealogy, the answer is probably no. And yet they lived lives as full as ours. They went to school, married, and had children. Most of them worked at their various occupations for decades and played with infants who grew up to become your parents. In all likelihood, your great-grandparents were very much alive less than one hundred years ago. But after all their labors and all the seasons they saw come and go, what awareness is there now that they ever drew a breath? If you, the direct descendant of these eight people, do not even know their names, then it's almost certain that no one else knows them or anything else about them either. They may have lived for eighty years, and not a trace of their lives remains. That's your life in less than one hundred years from today.What a sobering thought! Don goes on to use this motivation as one of many reasons to keep a journal. It can be an electronic journal (like a blog!), hand-written, or even audio- or video-recorded. You don't have to write in it every day and you don't have to write a long dissertation every time you sit down. Just keep a simple journal to leave some trace of your life.
I have also heard people use this as a motivation for scrapbooking. There are a lot of details we keep in our heads and sometimes those get lost as the years go by. Scrapbooking is a beautiful way to keep those memories alive for future generations. Basically, scrapbooking is just a more colorful form of journaling.
Don sums it up this way:
The simplest way is best. It's the one you're most likely to maintain over a lifetime to build a monument to God's faithfulness. And long after you've made your last entry, it's also the one most likely to introduce your great-grandchildren to your life and faith and to influence them for Christ's sake.
