Dear Grandchildren:

Wow! The busy summer is gone along with four weddings (including Karly’s sister Megan). You tired us out, but as a family we couldn’t be more proud. You brides created your own special weddings, and they were all different and unique. Your receptions were all different, but all spectacular and over the top. Again, we say “Congratulations!”

This month, I want to personally speak to you on behalf of all your grandparents. First of all, we wish all of you the very best as you start your marriages, go back to work, or college, grade school, and high school.

Bill Gothard, in his seminars on families, stresses the advantages that children have when they have a close relationship to their grandparents. He says it gives the family stability, continuity [continuity means to hold together], support, and love by providing grandchildren more role models to identify with.

Grandkids are the reason families gather together for families attend the grandkids’ events; thus allowing grandparents a closer ongoing relationship with all the family members too.

Now three of our grandchildren will be having children in the future and the process starts all over again. Your parents will be experiencing the stage of being grandparents, and some of us will become great grandparents, and some like Great-Grandma Conatser and my mother, Great-Grandma Freeman will be great, great grandmothers.

I’d like to use my mother as the example of a grandparent to make my point.

For my mother, this process started ninety-three years ago when she came into the world in 1921 on a dairy farm near Chesaning, Michigan.

Can you imagine the times back then?

After my mother was born, her father, Frank, traded in a horse carriage for his first car. They were small-time farmers with dairy cows, pigs, chickens, and a smokehouse for the meats they butchered. There were no refrigerators, freezers, radios, TVs, or anything electric since there was no electricity. They pumped their water from a well and carried it to the house by a pail. There were no showers or toilets. The farm machinery were horses and hard work by the whole family—two parents and five children. Usually the kids only went to grade school—if they went at all—because they were expected to work on the farm.

Grandchildren, I invite you to stop in and visit all of your grandparents from time to time to get a perspective of how they all started out. For example, my mom’s parents came from Czechoslovakia; my dad’s father came from England; and his mom came from Germany. Your grandparents and great-grandparents would love to share with you their history and family background. It’s important to know about your family heritage so you can someday pass this information to your children.

Here’s a thought. Over ten billion people have walked the earth since the beginning of time, and every last one of them, including you, is unique and different in countless ways, including the way we look, think, and speak.

The Scripture says over and over that you and I were made by God and for God.

Ephesians 1:4 says, “Long before you were conceived by your parents, you were conceived in the mind of God.”

And here’s the good part to remember. He uses the mixture of your family down through history and their DNA to make you. So, you’re not an accident. 

In Isaiah 44:2, God says, “I am your creator and you were in my care even before you were born.”

So what this is saying is, God had his hands on every person who has ever lived, and so it’s why He created you in your own special way.

Embrace life, knowing God is the reason we have a purpose, a destiny, and a future with him.

As I exhorted earlier in this letter, when you can, visit your grandparents even if it’s only to say “hi” and that you’re thinking of us.

Until next month, 

Love you, 

Grandpa