This is Dan’s third of three posts on his new Brazos book, Creating a Spiritual Legacy.

One of the categories I suggest when encouraging people to list their ideas for stories centers on family holidays. Since we are in the Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years season, make a list of traditions, practices, and specific events that you associate with these and other holidays.

Where did you generally meet for Thanksgiving or Christmas? Who was often there? What were favorite dishes served? Was their a usual order of events (open presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day)? We always had vegetable soup on Christmas Eve. I didn’t like vegetable soup, but since I knew we would be opening presents within an hour, it was my favorite meal of the year.

As well as thinking about what you usually did, give thought to specific holiday occasions. I remember the Christmas when I was 12. We didn’t have much money (I think we got foreclosed on not longer after) and the presents under the tree were sparse. When we three boys sorted them over and over again in the days before Christmas, as was our practice, we could tell they were mostly socks and other necessities. I figured I was old enough to take it like a man, so I feigned great enthusiasm for my new socks as we opened presents.

When all was opened—and it didn’t take long—my father sent my older brother out to the garage. He came back with a huge smile. Then it was my turn. I opened the door to the garage and there, sitting on a ping-pong table, were three new bikes. It took my breath away.

 Everyone has holiday stories—of delights and disasters and everything in between. Many of them convey important values, insights, and life lessons. Some are just fun to tell. Give it a shot.

This is the second of three posts from Dan on his new Brazos book, Creating a Spiritual Legacy.

A short definition of a spiritual legacy is the passing of wisdom from generation (or person) to another. And the best single way to do that is through stories. It’s easy to convince people of that, but sometimes hard to get them to actually tell their stories—especially on paper. A common question arises: “Where do I start?”

 The answer is to start with everyday life experiences and what you have thought and felt about them—then and now. Then tell yourself, “I’ll write just one story.” Thinking you’re going to write your autobiography is the surest road to paralysis. Just one story. If you enjoy it, then you can think about a second one.

 But which story? That requires a little preliminary work. I suggest making lists.

 Start with what I call an “events list.” If it helps, start a series of sentences with “The time that . . .” and then finish the sentences. Range far and wide through your life. Include the stories you already tell orally. Include stories about other people as well as yourself, including family stories from before you were born, but which you heard repeated as a child.

 Then make a “character list.” Who are the people from your life who need to be preserved with a story? They can be people you know well or people you met only once, or perhaps saw at a distance. (I heard Bobby Kennedy speak a few days before he was assassinated and could write a story about it.) All you need at this point is a name or brief identifier.

 A third list can be a “values list.” Put down—in a single word or short phrase—values and virtues that are important to you. This will require some reflection. You should include your highest values—for instance, honesty, faith, courage, compassion—but also include other things you value: humor, adventure, creativity.

 Any one of these lists will provide you story after story, but your most powerful stories will come when your lists intersect. When a character from your character list is part of an event on your events list that suggests a value from your value list, that is a story you need to tell.

In this first of three posts Dan Taylor introduces his new Brazos book and shares the story behind its birth.

I have written about spiritual legacy because I have myself been blessed by the spiritual legacy of others to me. As have you.

I first began thinking about spiritual legacy in the 1980’s when teaching life writing courses for seniors. In the beginning, I thought I was simply teaching a memoir course, letting people get some of their life down on paper. In reading their work, however, I discovered that they were telling powerful stories soaked in values, life lessons, and how they came to understand the world.

Most of these stories involved characters from their lives—family, friends, co-workers, teachers, and the like. I came to see how people are shaped by their stories and how stories are the primary vehicle for passing on what I came to see as a spiritual legacy.

It was also around this time that I became more keenly aware of the spiritual legacies that had shaped my own life. I come from a story-telling family, primarily because my father was a man who lived his life in light of the stories of his past (for better and worse). He was the main story-teller of the family, and once he discovered that I was likely to write some books, he started looking to me, I believe, to be the preserver of his stories.

Also in the 1980’s I wrote a book, Letters to My Children: A Father Passes on His Values, that explicitly tried to pass on values to my then young children through stories from my life. I wrote these letters with no thought of them being a book, but eventually they were collected. I had been blessed by the stories of others, and it was my turn to tell some of my own.

In the 1990’s I wrote another book, Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories, that explored how we all are shaped by the stories that surround us—from family, church, education, and popular culture. And I later helped start The Legacy Center, an organization devoted to helping people and institutions tell their stories.

So Creating a Spiritual Legacy grows out of a life time of learning and teaching about stories and how they tell us who we are and how to live. This new book is a practical, step-by-step guide to discovering your own spiritual legacy and contributing to the legacy of those you care about.