Transcript

My wife and I were on a vacation recently, and there was one of the couples there that we never met before. And we quickly, the very first evening together we became actually friends and got along great. So we started talking, and I asked the question of this couple, said, "Have you ever done any work to discover your ancestors? Have you ever researched that to see who you're connected to in your family lines?" And they said, "No, no, we haven't done that, but it is kind of interesting." And so I said, "Well, you know we have some really cool resources available to us that might be really interesting to you and could be very fun to do some exploration and see if we might be able to find something about your ancestors that you didn't know before." He said, "Are you kidding? You'd do that for me?" I said, "I would love to do that for you." He said, "Well, I'm not going to pass up that offer, so let's do it." OK. So I spent a little bit of time, spent two or three hours doing some research, pulled all of us together, assembled a fan chart for him and pulled out a few specific records that I knew he'd never seen before and a few ancestors he didn't know about. We invited him and his fiancee over for dinner. The day we were going to have them over for dinner he texted me--no, he called me up. Said, "Brad, my brother is in town from Arkansas, and I haven't seen him in a long time. I told him about the dinner tonight and what you're going to do showing us our family, showing us what you've discovered about our family tree. And he's chomping at the bit to come. Is there any way"--and I finished the sentence for him. I said, "Of course, bring him. We want him." "Are you sure? Is that an imposition?" I said, "No, he's your brother. It's his family too, and we got plenty of food. Bring him." We get them having this yummy dinner, said, "Come on into the living room. We got to show you what we found." So we kind of played it up as this big reveal but he is so exciting. He's literally like a kid at Christmas. It was not only fun to see how far back these generations went, but the real exciting part was when we showed him some of his family members he didn't know about. A great-grandparent he didn't know the name of, knew nothing about, but we had a picture and a birth certificate and a little bit of information about them--where they were born, where they died. Where we could show him a war record from his grandfather, things that he'd never seen before in his life. Some photos and documents that brought these people to life. And he's literally choking back the tears. So we get done with this and he goes, "How can I ever thank you?" He said, "This is the greatest gift anyone's ever given me." And I said, "This is thanks enough. This was so much fun to do, and it just meant the world to us to be able to share it with you."

The More the Merrier

Description
A dinner conversation about families quickly led to deep Gospel discussions and the discovery of two brothers’ previously unknown family lines.
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