This month, Legacy Lines throws a hearty Pennsylvania honor to Alexander Cairns, a great 1910s public speaker and author in his own right.
I bestow great honor to this man. Without his writing, Legacy Lines would have never gotten started. My first two novels would have never been written and our service would have never launched in 2020, without his legacy.
My wife’s great-grandfather, Alexander Carins was born in 1872 on the Emerald Isle (Ireland). He emigrated to the United States with his parents and settled in Northern Pennsylvania.
This transplanted shamrock, as he called himself, left to his family his charming autobiography written eighty, years ago.
His life-notebook, far from being a lengthy, handsomely bound novel never made it to some best sellers list in NewYork City. But the “Shamrock’s” notes found themselves nestled here to stay on the family’s best reading list. It will ever be here to let us know what he and his generation looked like.
I’m sure Alexander would have readily agreed that life is short and surges by too quickly.
Though our lives appear as merely a one second bleep on the radar screen, they are irreplaceable, thus very important to God Almighty Who created us. Because of that, every one of us has a story to tell. (on a piece of paper)
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, Shelby. I only skated through my college English class with a D. I’ll never be able to write anything that someone will ever be interested in reading.”
I won’t buy that excuse. However, I’ll sell you a challenge. Think over your life, write out a list of the valuable disciplines along with events which God has taken you through. As you’re hammering out your list, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that you will be utterly amazed at how interesting your life really is and how much of a blessing it could be to someone else.
Those future generations which you will never have the pleasure of meeting, will find it a rare pleasure themselves of knowing you on written page and getting just a glimpse of your faith and the legacy you left behind.
Everybody like the old Shamrock can write, because they have a story to leave behind.
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Recollect is an interesting word. Prefix in this word is Re- in essence redo something.
The last part of this word is collect.
Put those two together and you come up with re-collect. In other words to collect again your thoughts.
I remember or re-collect my thoughts about St. Patrick’s Day. I remember an old calendar that hung in our kitchen when I was a kid. The seventeenth of March was haled by a little green man smoking a pipe, dreaming of a pot of gold nested at the end of the rainbow.
All those narratives.
The Real Story of St. Patrick:
It’s not really known exactly the year, but Patrick lived in the early six hundreds. At 16 he was kidnapped from his home in England by a band of Irish pirates, who shipped him off to Ireland where he was sold as a slave. Being bought by a wealthy farmer, he learned the trade of shepherding sheep.
Just imagine, he, like King David, spent his days alone with the stars and the elements. Both can attest that the best thing about the job of shepherding alone in the wilderness is that you had plenty of time to be with the Lord.
At some point God had spoken to young Patrick to escape from Ireland by going to a certain city where he would find a particular ship which was waiting for him and embark to his home in England.
Once home, young Patrick learned more of the things of God and in time returned to Ireland where he no longer herded sheep but shepherded people into the Kingdom of God.
The real story wove into be the life of a real man, not a mythical “green man” on an old calendar.
