I just discovered the song “Sunday Drive” by Brett Eldredge and played it for Rick as we drove through our mountains yesterday on Grandparents’ Day. Tears filled our eyes as we realized the song described the legacy of his parents. When Rick was a little boy, his parents loved to take Sunday drives after church—seemingly drives to nowhere that were a bit boring for four rambunctious little boys piled into a car in the 60’s with no seatbelts or AC. But like the lyrics of “Sunday Drive”—those were some of the best of times for their young family as Roselan and Dee taught their boys life lessons without words. A recent widow, Roselan is our daughters’ only living grandparent and they adore her. It’s been months since we’ve seen her due to Covid and I miss her.  Thankfully, Roselan is still thriving and healthy at 87-years-old. Born on a farm in Albion, Nebraska, I love that Mom Dunagan drove a Model A on country roads in snowstorms to teach at a one-room schoolhouse before she was married to her beloved Dee. She raised four little boys—the second being my favorite—who all grew up to be hard-working and loving husbands and fathers. Roselan is a cancer survivor who bravely fought stage 4 lymphoma fifteen years ago. I remember being in tears back then, wondering if she would survive long enough to be at our daughters’ weddings one day. She not only survived, she thrived. A favorite memory with Mom is when she met me and my girls in New York City to celebrate their high school graduations—three generations of Dunagan women running through pouring rain after a Broadway show to get ice cream at midnight at the famous Serendipity restaurant.  Our granddaughter is Roselan’s namesake. Baby Quinn Roselan just turned one and she is beautiful like her great grandmother and seems to have her sweet spirit and sense of humor. I pray she grows up to be a lot like her Great Grandma Roselan, including carrying on the Norwegian tradition of making Lefse and Lutefisk on Christmas Eve. The older I get, the more I appreciate this remarkable woman and her legacy. Her greatest gift has been a lifetime of prayers over our family, and her unconditional love for each of us—never judging, only loving.   The end of the song “Sunday Drive: reminds us of the last time we were…

Just two years before my father Mark Bubeck died, I had the privilege of working with him to update his second book, now titled Warfare Praying. By then, he could no longer use the computer, so I asked him to write out a note to the reader to include in the front of the refreshed book. Within a few days, he called me to read the note he wrote over the phone. I put him on speaker, and I typed as he read the powerful words in his deep voice. He began . . . “Holy. Infinite. Eternal. Omnipotent. Almighty. These are ‘God’ words. They belong to Him alone and express truth about Him that will stand forever.” Tears fell as I typed; I knew I’d never forget that moment. A year later, when we had to move my dad into hospice care, I found the letter on a clipboard in his home. It was written in his beautiful handwriting—the same handwriting that penned lyrical poems for our birthdays, encouraging letters when we lived overseas, and powerful books that he wrote by hand. I never dreamed I’d find that handwritten note, especially just a few weeks before he died. God is so kind. I told that story at a workshop I taught at a writers’ conference just last weekend. The room was filled with women wanting to learn more about discipling their readers through the words that they write. My hope was to encourage them that their words matter, and that they may never know the full impact of their written words this side of heaven. I ended the workshop by reading a poignant story from my dad’s book that beautifully illustrates how he used his gift of writing to teach deep spiritual truths from God’s Word in creative ways. I am so grateful for my job as an acquiring editor at Moody Publishers. The door for this new career was partly opened because I worked with my dad on the editing—and wrote the new preface—for the updated version of his first book The Adversary. After joining Moody five years ago this week, our vice president said that he hopes the books we’re publishing today will still be impacting lives 100 years from now. I am confident that my father’s books will be on that list. (You can find Mark Bubeck’s books on warfare, prayer, and revival at moodypublishers.com by…

I am revisiting this post as our first granddaughter is now 18 months old. May this be her legacy story one day . . . Now in their sixties and me almost there, my two older sisters and I felt like we were little girls again as we huddled together looking at old slides, projected on the wall of our parents’ room. The Kodachrome slides from the ‘50s and ‘60s still held their vibrant colors, making it seem like our parents were back in their twenties and still living among us. We oohed and aahed as the wonder of old memories—long forgotten—seemed to fill up the whole room with the click of each new slide. First, we looked through the slides from the ‘40s, when our parents met and fell in love. Then came the photos of us three little girls, all born in Denver in the fifties, and blondies like our daddy. We’d all forgotten the time we wore new pastel dresses and our auntie curled our hair when we were reunited with our parents after their long ministry trip overseas. Mama had brought us dolls from Paris, and we each held them up proudly as we smiled our crooked teeth grins of little girls. But the photo that made us gasp was the one filled with the images of our mother in her thirties and both of our grandmothers, just in their sixties back in 1964. Two trusted mentors are also there. Nestled among our mama, grandmas, and mentors are us three little girls, just 11, 9 and 4 at the time.  The photo looks like it should be in a magazine, filled with splashes of different hues of blue—the mountain range behind us, the light blue ’63 Buick Roadmaster, Grandma’s flowered dark blue dress and scarf, Rhonda’s sweater, and Donna’s teal blue dress. Our other grandma rocked matching white shoes with her white purse. Donna, the middle sister, is huddled by Mama on the far left while Rhonda, the oldest, is to the far right by our Grandma Nessa, a farmer’s wife, and Grandma Eliza Christine, from Chicago whose parents were immigrants from Denmark. I love that four-year-old me is lost in her own little world, oblivious to the love, protection, joy, and beauty that hovers over her. Even my big sisters were my protectors at this stage in my little-girl life. This photo is even more treasured because just…