The Power of Spiritual Legacy

How to Give a Double-Gift

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A Double-Gift

A friend recently shared about a “double-gift” he received. His daughter gave him a journaling Bible, saying, “Dad, I’d like you to use this Bible for the coming year, making notes about your favorite verses and any thoughts that come as you read. Then we will give the Bible to Ben (his grandson) for his thirteenth birthday.” What a gift! To the grandfather and the grandson! With double rewards.

Other friends have shared how grateful they were for adult children or grandchildren giving them the Storyworth program, which emails a person a question per week for a year. At the end of the year, it takes all of the responses and creates a book. Still others have told me about the joy of being interviewed by grandchildren or younger neighbors for school projects. The gift of inviting an older adult to share their spiritual legacy — their body of stories, values, and wisdom — has profound impact — on the older adult and on the person who receives this legacy.

Challenges of Aging

I’ve shared before about the challenges older adults face. One study gathered them into six challenges that are navigated from adulthood to old age:

“acknowledgment and acceptance of the realities of aging; normalization of associated angst about the future; active reminiscence and possible longing for the past; accommodation to physical, cognitive, and social changes; search for new emotionally meaningful goals; and the expansion of the capacity to tolerate ambiguity and complexity of life circumstances.[1]

According to the authors of the study, the wide variety of stories emerging elders inhabit can cause them to feel “rudderless and isolated.”[2] These authors found that story work can help older adults navigate many of these challenges.

Story Work: Spiritual Care for Older Adults

Dr. Bruce Stevens, professor of aging and practical theology at Charles Sturt University, observed that spiritual caregivers often meet older adults whose stories are “under-told and under-read.”[3] He and others found that when older adults have caring and compassionate listeners for their stories, they navigate the challenges of older adulthood more easily and discover a greater meaning and purpose in their lives.[4] Finding a sense of purpose is crucial, because older adults who have a sense of purpose are actually less likely to suffer cognitive decline, heart attacks, and stroke.[5]

Skerrett et al found that story work helped their struggling clients with the challenges of older adulthood. Francine, a widow, struggled to remain hopeful for her future after losing her husband. Her counselor recommended she join a story group. In community with others, hearing and sharing stories, she was able to navigate the six tasks more successfully: “Having others bear witness to her stories provided profound affirmation and a renewal of hope for her future.”[6] Judith, whose husband had died recently of a progressive neuromuscular disease, struggled with angst about her future as well as maintaining meaningful goals. When she was referred to an autobiographical writing group, she integrated stories of her creativity in caring for her husband (attaching Velcro to his pants to make them easier to fasten) with her long lost passion of painting and studying art history. She applied to become a docent at the local art museum. With a newfound sense of purpose, she navigated the other tasks of aging more successfully.

Seeing Redemption and God’s Faithfulness in a Spiritual Legacy Workshop

Professor and developmental psychologist Dan McAdams found that when older adults recall life stories and find redemption in challenging or difficult stories, they are more prepared to face the limitations and losses that accompany older adulthood. As he explains, older adults “who construct positive resolutions to negative events tend to enjoy relatively high levels of happiness and well-being.”[7] In my recent spiritual legacy workshop I studied this theory, and I found that participants overwhelmingly saw God’s faithfulness in difficult events of their lives and were able to see redemption in their stories. Furthermore, this ability to see how God had worked corresponded with a hopeful outlook for future challenges of aging.

In the workshop, I also discovered asking older adults to share their spiritual legacy helps them to see the wholeness or coherence of their lives. Looking back over the ups and downs of life and seeing God’s faithfulness through it all strengthens an older adult’s sense that God has written their story and will continue to write it for eternity. As older adults face the barrage of challenges that accompany aging — disease or dementia, physical limitations and loss of independence, grief over dying loved ones, this sense of a coherent story authored by God bolsters them physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Blessing the Next Generation with Perspective and Hope

Not only do the older adults benefit from the process of recalling and sharing their spiritual legacy, the next generation benefits as well. During the pandemic, young researchers found that interviewing older adults gave them perspective on this agonizing season in history: One 85-year-old woman remarked, “I’ve seen just about everything that can happen on this planet. If you haven’t lived as long as I have, you might think this was the worst thing that ever happened. But people who know history know the difference.”[8] We can imagine the struggles this woman might have endured having lived through the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, and the Civil Rights movement. Just think of the perspective a younger person could gain by listening to this woman’s stories about living through these difficult seasons of history.

In addition to providing the next generation with perspective, Christians find a more compelling reason for blessing the next generation with their stories. In Psalm 78, older adults are commanded to tell their stories of God’s rescue in difficult seasons: “He commanded our fathers to teach their children, that the next generation might know them [“the glorious deeds of the Lord” (Ps. 78:4)]” (Psalm 78:5-6). As Pastor Joe Novenson says, “The proactive, preventative, preparative step commanded by God himself to reverse this wide catastrophic Gospel-amnesia is for the ‘fathers’ to teach the next generation of their God.”[9] When spiritual parents pass on the stories of God’s redemption in their lives to the next generation of believers, they will “set their hope anew on God” (Ps. 78:7), and they will not turn and run in the day of battle (Ps. 78:9).

A Call to Older and Younger Adults

If you are an older adult reading this, I hope you hear two things. First, your spiritual legacy is a gift you are called to give to the next generation. No matter what limitations you have or losses you have experienced, you can always tell a story. And yes, your stories of hard times are an especially good gift. Second, sharing your spiritual legacy is a gift that blesses you as it draws you to see how God has worked in your life. Writing or recording these stories can have a powerful and positive impact on your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

If you are a “younger” person reading this, I hope you hear at least two things. First, asking an older adult to share their spiritual legacy is a life-changing gift that will remind them of their meaning and purpose. Second, you need the legacy of the previous generation, because it will help you to gain perspective on your struggles and your gifts.

I’d love your thoughts: how have you benefited from either sharing or hearing an older adult’s spiritual legacy?

Before you go: Would you please click that “heart” sign if you enjoyed this? Or consider sharing it? When you do, other people can more easily find this column.

P. S. If you are looking for a good Valentine’s gift for yourself or for someone whose legacy you’d like to know, consider my next spiritual legacy workshop, which begins March 4 and meets online for six weeks. If you have any questions, send me a message or leave a comment below.

Hi! I’m Elizabeth, and I love learning about older adulthood! I’m a writer, speaker, and coach who helps people navigate the issues of aging, caregiving, legacy, and end-of-life. I wrote Preparing for Glory: Biblical Answers to 40 Questions about Living & Dying in Hope of Heaven and several devotionals. Every month, I send out an email with free and paid resources for aging graciously. If you’d like to get this email on the first of the month, sign up here: http://eepurl.com/b__teX.

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[1] Karen Skerrett, Marcia Spira, and Jasmine Chandy, “Emerging Elderhood: Transitions from Midlife,” Clinical Social Work Journal 50, no. 4 (December 1, 2022): 377–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-021-00791-2, 383.

[2] Skerrett, Spira, and Chandy, 379.

[3] Bruce A. Stevens, The Storied Self: A Narrative Approach to the Spiritual Care of the Aged (London: Lexington Books, 2018), 14.

[4] William L. Randall, “Transcending Our Stories: A Narrative Perspective on Spirituality in Later Life,” Critical Social Work 10, no. 1 (2009): 31-46., https://doi.org/10.22329/csw.v10i1.5796, 35.

[5] Laura Carstensen, Bulent Turan, Susanne Scheibe, Nilam Ram, Hal Ersner-Hershfield, Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin, Kathryn P. Brooks, and John R. Nesselroade, "Emotional experience improves with age: evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling," Psychology and aging 26, no. 1 (2011): 21.

[6] Skerrett, Spira, and Chandy, “Emerging Elderhood,” 383.

[7] Dan P. McAdams, The Art and Science of Personality Development (New York: The Guilford Press, 2015), 301.

[8] Majse Lind, Susan Bluck, and Dan P McAdams, “More Vulnerable? The Life Story Approach Highlights Older People’s Potential for Strength During the Pandemic,” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B 76, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): e45–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbaa105, e45.

[9] Joe Novenson, “Aging and the Unfinished Calling: The Older Disciple’s Ministry to the Younger Follower of Jesus,” 2023, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d3678fe4b0bdc8a9465faa/t/66d89f2501a2c03034905feb/1725472549799/Aging+and+The+Unfinished+Calling.pdf, 3.