How Do We Leave a Legacy Without Philanthropy
Over the past several years I had been talking to people at my church about Camp Luther.https://campluther.com/
Camp Luther is a part of the legacy of my late uncle William C. Birk. Uncle Billy, as we called him was the uncle that I never really got to know except by the legacy that he left. A legacy to me is like what your reputation was when you were living except that it will last well beyond your lifetime.
My thought is that my Uncle Billy had a great love for the Lord and he had been given the gift of leadership. Before his work in getting Camp Luther established, he worked with the local chapter of the Lutheran Layman’s League https://www.lhm.org/about/ourhistory.asp to get WSAU to broadcast a worship service from Zion Lutheran then an LCMS congregation in 1937. While other congregations now stream worship services over the internet, Zion https://zionlutheranwausau.com/ still uses the airwaves.
The next project was Camp Luther based at Three Lakes, WI. Uncle Billy led a committee for the North Wisconsin District http://www.nwdlcms.org/ to purchase an old resort for $22,000. With that, Camp Luther was launched in 1946. Camp Luther became a thriving year-round outdoor ministry center in the 1970s. Many young lives were touched in places like Camp Luther. Mine included.
Leaving a legacy might happen just by volunteering for something that you find of value. Here we see members of a mobile skills group building a boardwalk on the Plover River segment of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Eastern Marathon County, Wisconsin. https://www.iceagetrail.org/ Their legacy is a part of creating a 1400 mile long hiking trail following the glacial moraine in Wisconsin giving Wisconsinites and others a chance to experience the beauty of our great state. One such person to me is Will Sanford who, along with others, got the ball rolling. Today even after reroutes and new sections added. It is a great trail!
Teachers leave legacies all the time. Good teachers inspire their students to learn at any level from elementary all the way to college and university. I can think of many from my early years at Trinity Lutheran School in Wausau.https://trinitywausau.org/lutheran-school/ I remember many of my teachers there.
Miss Ida Lau was my first-grade teacher. I remember how I struggled at first in learning to read. In teaching children to read, Miss Lau had divided the class into three groups based on the ability to read. At first, I fell into the lowest or slow readers group. As the year went on, I began to excel and I wound up getting back into the top group!
The numerous other teachers at Trinity from Kindergarten through 8th Grade inspired me to learn. They left legacies in their students like me. Take my teachers at Wausau West High School. They also left their legacies in me. Certainly the professors at UW Marathon County http://uwmc.uwc.edu/and the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire https://www.uwec.edu/about/did the same. The message was if you stopped learning, you will start to die.
Teachers at all levels teach people how to think and grow and we are who we are because of them. I remember taking a class on the history of modern Germany. At that time, due to cold war politics, Germany was a divided nation between the east and west. One of my history professors, Dr. Ronald Warloski, observed when talking about the walls that divided that country that they kept people from being free. Education is the key to freedom. As a result of my time at Eau Claire, my heart does bleed blue and gold.
Among the other influencers of my life, the ones who have left their legacies with me in the most powerful way are those who have been my pastors. They have admonished me when I was wrong. They have supported me when all other chips were down and my heart was broken. At both Trinity Lutheran in Wausau, WI www.trinitywausau.org and University Lutheran http://universitylutheran.org in Eau Claire, they have encouraged me in my faith walk and given me the ability to grow as a man.
I think well of the soldiers who fought for this country in its wars. I think of those who fought for its freedom and desire for justice. When we Americans think of war heros, we often tend to think of the great generals like William T. Sherman or George Patton, not to mention Douglas MacArthur. The real heroes are lesser-known like Robert Gould Shaw of the Massachusetts 54th or Richard Winters or maybe Richard Bong. Robert Gould Shaw had two battles to fight. He had to lead his men to fight the Confederate Army and the entrenched prejudice in the Union Army as well.
Richard Winters took Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and gave them the courage to fight. Because of this the United States and Europe are free.
Richard Bong was a P-38 pilot who was said to have shot down Yamamoto’s plane helping to bring an end to the war in the Pacific. A hero, yes. As General Chuck Yeager once said, “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.”That would be Richard Bong who would die in a crash as a test pilot in 1946.
Leaving a legacy simply is not just about having a lot of money to give away. It is about working to make a difference in people’s lives. I hope that, like my Uncle Billy, I too can leave a legacy that shapes lives to come. I do hope that I can leave my community and the world in a better place for others.
What a beautiful walk!
