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Thursday 3 November 2011

Letter's to my Daughter's Daughter

Letters to my Daughters Daughter  04-11-2011

I have no idea where to start, what to write or where this is going. I just feel to write? I don’t know your name, what you look like or how you sound, but I do know that you are my daughter’s daughter and so you are a part of me. You are my responsibility. You are a product of my thoughts, decisions and actions.

Lately God has been speaking to me about preparing a legacy for my children’s children. The more he spoke to me about it, though not in so many words but more so in gut feeling and remembrance, the more I began to truly wish to leave you with a lasting legacy. In all honesty I initially felt a fool for thinking about this, im only 22? Why am I thinking about my children’s children at the age of 22? Im young, carefree and should be enjoying the prime of life right? However the one word which kept coming back to me was Responsibility. How you turn out, the sort of woman you become, the morals and values that you hold, those are all my responsibility, and 22 yes I may be, but this is one 22 year old that is ready to step up to my responsibility.

I want you to be proud of your mother, my daughter. I want you to be thankful of the way I raised her and the morals that I instilled in her that she has passed down to you. I want you to be proud of the man she chose to make your father because of the values I taught her on how a man should treat a lady and how a lady should serve a man. I want you to cherish the faith and spirituality that you look forward to sharing with your children because grandma dedicated her life to God and loved serving him and was such close friends with him. I deeply desire for you to one day have a conversation with God about me and for him to tell you about mine and his relationship and for you both to laugh and enjoy the memories that he and I once shared. But before all of this is possible I know I must set the ground running now.....

Now, when I make decisions I make them with you in mind. I think about the man that I will marry and do not think selfishly on who I want because I want them, but I want to be with a man who will make a wonderful and committed father to your mother. A man, who will teach her by example of how a man is to treat a lady, take care of a lady, provide for and cherish a lady. A man who you will be proud to call your grandfather. I do not ever wish for you to think of your grandfather and be ashamed of the man that I chose to be with and wish that I had chosen differently. I hate the thought of you sitting with your girlfriends whilst you all discuss marriage and you uttering the words “I don’t want my marriage to be like all the women in my families”....instead I want you sit at mine and your grandfathers 60th wedding anniversary and look on with pride and admiration and whisper to God above.... “I want that”.

I want you to come from a family line of good women, not necessarily great women in terms of deeds or actions, but good women with good hearts who put their God, husbands and children before all things.
Now I may not know you yet but im sure you’ll be beautiful (you’re a part of me of course you will be haha). But I want to teach you how to appreciate your outer beauty but to understand that there is a far more precious type of beauty which radiates from the inside out. I want you to learn all about integrity, sisterhood, honesty, decency, self worth and self love. I want you to have a wonderful life filled with love, peace, joy and fulfilment. I want you to be a great wife to your husband (a great support system, his backbone and his friend), a great mother to your children (their cook, their cleaner, their friend, their voice of reason, their number 1 go to person), I want you to be a lover of God (his child, his friend, his reliable daughter). But I know before you can be all of these things...I must firstly become all of these things....

I am trying my best to become the woman that will be able to pass of all these things down to you. You will be my legacy, and I want you to reflect the woman that I was. I am watching my actions, my words and my thoughts. I am keeping you in mind when I make decisions on who to date, where to go, what to say, what friends I should keep, what church I should attend, what prayers I should pray. I am no longer living a selfish life. I am stepping up to the plate and becoming a woman who is thinking about her children’s children. It’s no longer about me but it’s about us. It’s about what our family will stand for, what we will be known for and the legacy that we will leave. It’s certainly not easy because to be quite honest most of the time I just want to do what others are doing, and I can, but I won’t. I won’t because I’ve come to understand that the actions that I make today will affect you tomorrow. If I decide to join a cult you will always have a cultish root in your family line. If I decide to drink without care you will have an alcoholic trait in your family line. If I decide to sleep around you will always have a harlot spirit in your family line. If I decide to backbite and bitch you will also have the seed of a lack of integrity. If I decide to be lazy you will always have an idle mindset. If I decide to marry a man because I want him and fail to think about how he would be as a father and as a man you will always come from a fatherless generation. If I decide to be a disobedient wife you will never understand what it takes to keep a marriage together and the patience and endurance that a woman must have in order to remain a good woman able to keep a good home. I do not wish to pass these things down to you; I wish to pass down to you all good things. These will be my legacy to you.
Lots of love; your mother’s mother.

Hi there reader!

I hope that by reading the note above to my daughter’s daughter you have been inspired to no longer live with the illusion that you live for yourself alone. In proverbs 13:22 it says that “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous”.  Although the scripture appears to be talking about financial wealth I believe leaving an inheritance doesn’t always have to be about monetary affairs or land etc, it definitely can and does refer to us leaving behind the things that money can’t buy.

It’s a huge responsibility that we have but we can fulfil this so easily. Simply just by working on our own characters and our own flaws and working towards perfecting those daily. No one is without their struggles and no one is without blemish, but understanding that we cannot live selfishly with the ideology of believing that no one else is affected by our actions is key. I hope that by reading this you are able to begin your journey to leaving a good and fruitful legacy for your children’s children. Allow your seed and their seed to be proud of the woman they came from.

Dont forget to share this with someone else via the links below if you found it useful :-)

k.Ashanike xx-xx