There are conversations that never really end. Most of our words disappear into the ordinary flow of life. We forget what we said last Tuesday, or even yesterday afternoon. Yet some conversations settle deeply within us. Years later, we can still hear the tone of voice, remember the room, or picture the face of the person who spoke. Those words become more than memories. They become part of the architecture of our lives.
I suspect most of us carry words like these. They may have come from a parent, a spouse, a teacher, or a friend. Some were words of blessing. Some remain difficult to understand. Others wounded us and continue to exert an influence we wish they did not possess. Whether welcomed or resisted, inherited words help shape the lives we build.
For several years, I have been trying to understand what it means to live authentically. One question has become increasingly important to me: What truly forms a human life? We often point to our achievements, education, possessions, or decisions. These matter. Yet we are also formed by the words we receive, the loves we inherit, and the relationships through which we learn to understand God, ourselves, and one another.
The opening of 1 John 3 describes Christian identity as something received: “See what great love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” The sentence begins in astonishment. Before John tells his readers what to do, he asks them to contemplate what has already been given.
That order matters. We live in a culture that often urges us to construct ourselves, curate an image, and become whoever we choose to be. John offers a gentler and deeper starting point. Before we perform, we receive. Before we establish our worth, we are loved. Before we speak, a word has already been spoken over us.
In February 2004, my brother called me in Thailand. My father had suffered a stroke after falling in the bathroom and striking his head. He was in a coma, and my brother was asking for consent to discontinue life support. Before I could face that decision from a distance, I knew I had to return to my father’s bedside. I flew back to Canada.
The impending loss of my dad, Peter G. Klassen, cast a shadow over our whole family. During the three or four days after life support was withdrawn, historical wounds surfaced. Before he died, our father’s life did not feel simply like a gift or a blessing.
I spent the last night of his life beside his hospital bed. In the morning, my oldest sister and her husband took their turn, and I returned to my parents’ condo for a few hours of sleep. He died that morning.
Some hours later, the family gathered in Dad’s room. As the adults talked, the youngest grandchild raised his voice and asked for everyone’s attention. Johnny was six years old.
“I have something to say about Peter.
He showed us who he was, and we can do the same.
You cannot be greater than who you are. God will always love you, no matter if your life is sad or happy. We can show each other the different ways we live.
And I want to thank you all. No matter what, we can love each other.
One more thing. You can never know everything in this world.”
Those words did not erase the wounds in the room. They did, however, interrupt them. For a moment, they offered another way of seeing my father’s life. Disappointment did not disappear, but blessing entered the room beside it.
Some words continue to bless us because they direct us toward receiving life rather than controlling it.
John continues, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” There is remarkable humility in that sentence. We are given assurance without mastery. We may know whose we are before we know everything we shall become. Maturity, then, need not mean certainty. It may look more like trust.
The older I become, the more I wonder whether many of the deepest spiritual lessons are lessons in receiving. We receive life, forgiveness, friendship, care, and opportunities we could never have produced alone. Even faith begins as gift before it becomes response.
Later in the same chapter, John writes, “Let us love, not in word or speech but in truth and action.” Here identity and practice belong together. Love becomes credible when it takes form in ordinary acts of faithfulness, patience, sacrifice, forgiveness, and care.
As an ex-philosopher, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about truth. Philosophers often ask whether our statements correspond to reality. That remains an important question. John invites another one: Are our lives becoming truthful? Is there less distance between the love we claim to have received and the people we are becoming?
A second inheritance came to me through my father-in-law, Chutchawan Thamasorn.
At the end of 2014, my family was still living in Thailand, but I had accepted a teaching position in my Manitoba hometown. We were preparing to move to Canada. A couple of weeks before my flight, my father-in-law and I sat on the front porch of his home and shared a few beers.
In my broken Thai and his broken English, we talked about the move. He was grieving the coming separation from his daughter and grandchildren. Their regular presence had been woven into his life, and he wanted me to understand the cost of their leaving.
Then he did something more. He entrusted them to me. Moving between Thai and English, he said, “I cannot be there for your family now, and I trust you. Take care of Air, and take care of the kids. Help them to live a good life.”
It was a sacred trust. At the time, I was preoccupied with travel, immigration, work, and the practical demands of beginning again in Canada. Only gradually did I understand that he had not merely offered advice. He was handing me his love in the only way he could.
These two fathers left me different inheritances. One taught me how to receive life; the other taught me how to give it away. One came as blessing, the other as responsibility. Both have helped me understand love more truthfully.
This has become especially vivid because both of my children will soon move away from home. Our oldest is going to Thailand for a work opportunity, and our youngest is going to art school in Ontario. I am no longer reflecting only as a son or son-in-law. I am becoming a father who must learn, in a new way, to love with open hands.
For years, parenting required us to hold our children close: to protect, provide, guide, correct, comfort, and remain present. Eventually, love must also learn to entrust. Love has not weakened. It is being asked to become truthful in a different form.
Every family carries gifts and grief. None of us receives only one or the other. We inherit blessings and burdens, wisdom and wounds, responsibilities and hopes. Christian faith does not require us to deny those inheritances. It invites us to bring them into the love of God, where what is broken may be healed, what is fearful may be transformed, and what is beautiful may be carried forward.
Jesus also left an inheritance. On the night before his death, he gave bread and wine, washed feet, spoke peace, and entrusted his followers to one another. His last words did more than conclude a life. They helped begin a community. In Christ, the Father’s love was not merely declared. It took form in a human life.
This is where love becomes more than memory. The love we receive is not meant to remain hidden in private feeling or preserved only in family stories. It becomes visible in the world through the ways we feed, forgive, visit, protect, accompany, and accept responsibility for one another.
Love becomes truthful when it enters the real conditions of another person’s life.
Perhaps the lasting importance of our inherited words lies here. We cannot control everything they have done to us, and we cannot choose all that has been placed into our hands. We can, however, decide how faithfully we will inhabit what we have received.
What words continue to live within me? What blessing have I not fully received? What responsibility has been entrusted to me? What love am I being asked to release rather than possess? These are not questions that can be answered once. They accompany us as our roles change, our families age, and our lives become inheritances for others.
One day, each of us will speak our own last words, though we cannot know or script them. They will arise from the lives we are living now. They will disclose something of the loves we have cultivated, the responsibilities we have carried, and the grace we have learned to receive.
Perhaps, then, we live with open hands: open to receive the blessing that has been given to us, and open to carry forward the responsibilities that love has entrusted to us. The inheritance we leave will never be flawless. It may nevertheless point beyond us, toward the love that first made our lives possible.
