On Writing a Better Story

Years ago, after my father died, I wrote down some of the things I remembered him saying. No education is ever wasted. Don’t spend what you don’t have, always pay cash. It’s a privilege to pay taxes – somebody has to pay for the roads.

These things were part of our everyday conversation, and I don’t know that my father meant them to stick in my mind forever. But I’ve come to think of them as part of my dad’s legacy to me, his wise sayings about life passed down from father to daughter.

I also remember my father telling me that before his mother had come to Canada, as a young woman, she had been educated in China to become a teacher. That had seemed strange to me, since if anything, the boys would have been educated before the girls. How was my grandmother able to get an education? She had died before I was born, so I was never able to ask her.

Yet over the years, as I taught English at a local Bible college, as teaching and preaching became part of my ministry in the church, I often thought of my grandmother. Although I had never known her, somehow teaching had become part of her legacy to me.

A few years ago, I made a passing comment about this to one of my aunts, my dad’s youngest sister. “No, no, she wasn’t a teacher,” my aunt immediately responded. “The family was too poor for her to get an education. That’s why she was sent to Canada, to marry your grandfather and get a better life.”

What? Suddenly, I didn’t know what to think!

All these years, I had lived with the sure knowledge that my grandmother had been trained as a teacher. That’s what I knew of her from my father. But my aunt’s response made me wonder. As my aunt’s older brother, had my father known something of their mother’s past that my aunt didn’t know? Or had he reimagined a better story for himself and for me as his daughter? In my childish imagination, had I somehow made up the story? Maybe I’m mis-remembering my own past, and my dad never told me about his mother. Maybe I imagined the whole thing.

After all, my grandmother the teacher makes for a good story. I like to think of her ahead of her own time, with the rare opportunity of getting an education, then coming to Canada to make a new life, and passing on her love of learning to her children. I like to see myself following in her footsteps – as a dreamy child who loved books, as an eager student who loved reading and writing, as a pastor and educator preparing to teach this fall.

I suppose I’ll never know the truth about my grandmother, or how I might find it. I have one story from my father, another story from my aunt. No personal journals in my grandmother’s own words. No testimonials from others. No historical documents. No answers to my many questions.

How about you? What do you know of your past and family history? Are there gaps or inconsistencies in the stories you’ve been told? Have you gone searching to find the truth?

There’s value in history and in learning about our past, of sifting through archives and asking questions of those with first-hand knowledge of people and experiences long past. I imagine my grandmother the teacher would have valued that kind of research.

Yet however much we might delve into our past, there are some puzzles we may never solve. We don’t know everything, and we can’t know everything in this life – not about the past, not even about our own family history.

So for now, I’m letting my questions about my grandmother the teacher just be.

What’s more important for me and for all of us is the story we’re writing in our own lives today and going forward. I can’t know whether my grandmother was a teacher or not, or what kind of teacher she might have been. But what kind of teacher do I want to be? What kind of teacher am I today? I never knew her as a person. But what kind of person do I want to be, and who am I today?

Most importantly, who is God calling me to be today and tomorrow? What is God’s call on your life now and for the future? Whatever our past, whatever we might know or not know of our family history, how will we move forward? What story are we writing?

“I trust in you, Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands.”
—Psalm 31:14-15