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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Who Are Our Ancestors?

If you have on your hands a pedigree, then ancestry is an important and major issue.  If you have on your hands a mixed breed, a stray with little emphasis on purity of line, then ancestry is much less important.  As a kid, I knew my grandmother, and had some sense of her parents and siblings, but for the most part that was the extent of my interest in a family tree.  Ancestry was seldom an issue of discussion in our home.  The characters in the Bible populated our ever-present world of ancestors.  We heard about these people regularly and with the interest of observing our closest relatives.  And in a sense they were.  For our inheritance was not of a single clan.  It was evident we were a throwback to no one family, but to the human family.  The important lessons about character and its strengths and weaknesses were continually highlighted as we studied people who shared our traits in the Bible.  And they were not my kin only, but evidence of a shared kinship in the larger community.  I have come to think that this is the strongest relationship; and that in many ways Biblical times most closely reflect current times.  From this viewpoint, pride of ancestry is not as important as persistent humility before perennial challenges best tracked in scripture from Adam and Eve to present times.

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