A certain percentage of lake shore properties in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin are essentially family legacies, handed down from generation to generation. These cabins and lots are not only set in beautiful and peaceful places – they also have years (even sometimes many decades), of precious family memories attached to them. In such cases, the lakeshore dream is not only about owning your own up-north vacation. It is about building the future by bridging the past and the present. It is about acquiring a store of laughter, and recollections, and good times together as a family. It is about creating a long term legacy.
At LakeshoreDreams.com, we have a mission that involves helping families to begin or perpetuate that lakeshore legacy. However, as we approach Thanksgiving and Christmas, it is our desire to share with you an even greater legacy and even greater mission with which we have been entrusted.
As a way to communicate that, owner of LakeshoreDreams.com, Eric Canfield, has asked me to get personal this month, and share a little about my own family legacy.
In case you missed the byline, my last name is Hilpert. The Hilperts began with a legacy of land, more than five hundred years ago. They were part of the nobility in the country of France, and being nobility in those days meant, above all else, that you were an owner of land. It was the ownership of land that made a person a nobleman. It is safe to assume, therefore, that those medieval Hilperts drew a sense of identity, pride and purpose from owning land. When one generation died, the legacy that they left the next generation was primarily a legacy of land-ownership.
But early in the 1500s, that Hilpert family was faced with a choice. Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses onto the door of a chapel in Germany, and it turned the world upside down. What Luther wrote was true, right, good, and helpful to anyone who wanted to be closer to God. But it was also a threat to the power of princes, kings, emperors and bishops.
All of Europe took sides. The king of France, and most of the French nobility, supported the Roman Catholic church, and their own continued power and dominance over the common people. But the Hilperts somehow believed that Luther was right. They could see the great value and truth in allowing people to read the Bible for themselves, and to be responsible for their own relationship with God.
Eventually, the Hilperts had to make a choice between a legacy of land and a spiritual legacy. Would they continue on in their own power and prestige, or would they risk generations of land ownership for what they believed to be true and right? They chose the spiritual legacy.
History later called them French Huguenots – nobility that defied the French King and the major power-brokers, and supported the Protestant reformation. They were persecuted, and their land was taken from them. They were forced to flee into the area we now call Germany.
But even though they lost their land, they gained something else. There is a fairly long period that our family doesn't know much about. But the first Hilpert who came to America in the early 1800s, was an ordained Lutheran pastor, who came as a German speaking missionary. And the spiritual legacy has continued on. In every generation of Hilperts in the United States since that first missionary, there has been at least one pastor.
We don't know how far back in history the line of pastors goes. We do know that the spiritual legacy goes all the way back to, at least, the Protestant Reformation, when the Hilperts chose spiritual priorities over their own comfort and power. It is interesting to realize that if they had chosen instead to keep the land and ignore their consciences, they might have continued to own a piece of French soil for a time. But only until the French revolution deposed the nobility – less than three hundred years later. The spiritual legacy, however, has far outlasted the existence of the noble classes, and continues even today, five hundred years later. If what the Hilperts stood up for is in fact true, then the spiritual legacy will continue even beyond this world and human history, for eternity.
That kind of generational legacy does not just happen by accident. It begins with a choice, sometimes a very painful one. And it is perpetuated as fathers and mothers pass on the values of the legacy to their children and grandchildren. They talk about what is important to them. They live out their priorities, allowing the next generation to see their struggles and choices in real life situations.
I am one of the pastors in my generation of the Hilpert family (I am also a freelance writer, as you can see). My father is one in his. My grandfather was a banker and a businessman, but my 53-volume set of Martin Luther’s writings were passed down to me from him. He is one of the many people who came before me who was not a vocational minister, but who, nevertheless, passed down that spiritual legacy from father to son and grandson, for five centuries.
At LakeshoreDreams.com, we want to take this opportunity to offer our gratitude to the legacies left to us by the generations that have gone before us. During this special, thankful time of year, we want to recommit to you, our readers, that we will continue to strive to help you offer your loved ones a lasting legacy.
Land is a tremendous resource and an investment that can pay all sorts of uncounted dividends in family memories. We are not discouraging anyone from that investment. In fact, if no one invested in that sort of legacy, we would be out of business. But at this time of year, we wish to also acknowledge, that at least in our opinion, there is a legacy that outlasts even the family ownership of land, and is far more important. That lasting legacy is found, in our humble opinion, through faith in Jesus Christ. His legacy has been celebrated every year about this time, for the past seventeen centuries or so.
For us, it is our only truly lasting legacy. And because we care about it, we wish to share it.
Merry Christmas from all of us at LakeshoreDreams.com
