James Dobson - Your Legacy: The Greatest Gift

The year was 1862 and the Civil War was tearing our young nation apart. Abraham Lincoln was the newly elected president, and his Army of the Potomac was losing one battle after another to General Robert E. Lees Confederate Army. It was a troubled time for a country that had begun with such promise.

On November 15 of that year, a baby boy was born to the McCluskey family in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they named him George Washington in honor of the Father of our Country. Mr. and Mrs. McCluskey were devout Christians and their son was raised in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

George grew up and married Alice Turnell on November 14, 1886. They lived happily together for forty-nine years. He died at seventy-two years of age. Alice lived to be ninety-eight. They were to become my great-grandparents. He was a farmer on the plains of Texas for many years until an itinerant minister came to their town. George went to hear him preach and had a dramatic encounter with Jesus Christ. In days to come, he felt a definite call to the ministry and spent the rest of his life working as an evangelist and a pastor for numerous churches. Winning people to Christ was his greatest passion. He was about six feet five inches tall, about the same height as Abraham Lincoln.

G. W. McCluskey died on November 14, 1935. His granddaughter became my mother, and she was two months pregnant with me when her grandpa died. I regret that I never had an opportunity to meet this good man. As you will soon understand, I owe him so much!

Alice, who I knew as Nanny, helped to raise me. One of my earliest memories was lying in a bassinet and looking up at the woman who smiled down upon me. She wore a knitted cap that had fuzzy balls dangling from yarn. Though it might be difficult to believe, I have vague memories of reaching up from my tiny crib and grasping the balls. I couldnt have been more than fifteen months old. That introduction to Nanny was one of my earliest glimmers of self-awareness, and from it came the beginnings of my love for my great-grandmother. An even earlier memory was of being held in someones arms, perhaps it was Nanny, who was feeding me something that smelled like the baby food known then as Pabulum. I still recall how it tasted. (Not very good.)

In years that followed, Nanny talked often to me about her life with George. She never called him by his first name, of course. He was always referred to as my husband, or your great-grandfather. Nanny told me fascinating stories about their life in a cabin on the frontier and how panthers (mountain lions) would prowl around at night trying to kill their squealing pigs. My eyes must have been as big as saucers as the imagery of those big cats became real.

Nanny also told me about the prayer life of her husband. For the last several decades of his life, this patriarch of the family prayed specifically for the spiritual welfare of his children and for those yet to come. He devoted the hour from 11 a.m. to 12 noon every day for this purpose. Toward the end of his life, he said the Lord had made a very unusual promise to him. Reverend McCluskey had been assured that every member of four generations of his family would be Christians. Well see how that prophecy manifested itself through the next eighty years and continues to this day.

What an incredible heritage has been handed down to our family. It is remarkable to think that a man in his seventies, whom I would not know until we get to heaven, was on his knees talking to God about his progeny. Now my great-grandfathers prayers reach across four generations of time and influence our lives today.