From mid-June to mid-July this year, Sam and I attended four weddings and a funeral.

The weddings were riotous, joyous affairs with much laughing, dancing, eating and drinking as four young couples, brimming over with love and life, committed themselves to each other and a future that was full of potential and mystery.

The funeral was sombre and emotional, as we celebrated a life well lived through tears and smiles. We heard hilarious and brilliant stories of a man much loved who lived a full life with a woman he adored.

Before he died, my grandad said that he and my grandmum got married because they wanted to start a family. By the time the both of them had passed away, their family of two had grown to thirty three, including children, their spouses, grandchildren, their partners and great-grandchildren, with three more on the way.

My grandparents had a wedding over sixty years ago. I’m sure it was a riotous, joyous affair with much laughing, dancing, eating and drinking. They would have been young, brimming over with life and love, looking down the path stretching before them that held such promise. They couldn’t have known at that point the life they would have together. The joy, the pain, the thrilling blessings, the heart-breaking losses, the triumphs and the failures. But those of us at the funeral had the privilege to look back at that life, to give thanks for it and to be inspired by it. Their family, we, are their legacy. They fulfilled their ambition to start a family and that family, with all its flaws, keeps growing and thriving.

What do you want your legacy to be? I wonder whether my friends at their weddings were thinking about their legacy. About what they would be remembered for when their time comes. It’s not something we think much about. But sat in that pew, I had a think about mine, about ours, which may well be family too, in all senses of the word, blood and not. Who knows. But what I do know is that we have already seen so much of God’s faithfulness and goodness and I know we are yet to see it all. Thankfully He knows what our legacy will be, one that will hopefully bring Him much glory, and I’m content with that for now.