I used to think a legacy was something you built with your hands. A family business passed down, a well-worn Bible with your name inscribed on the flyleaf, a piece of land that generations would call home. Tangible things. Things you could point to and measure.
My grandmother left none of that. Her estate, if you could call it that, was a small apartment that smelled of mothballs and simmering onions. Her most valuable possession was a chair.
A simple, worn armchair by the window that looked out onto a parking lot. That chair, I understand now, was her command center. It was the place from which she built something far more permanent than anything made of brick or mortar. She built an unseen architecture of prayer, and long after she was gone, I found myself living inside of it.
We talk about prayer often in the church, but I wonder if we’ve made it too small. We’ve boxed it into mealtime blessings and desperate petitions in hospital waiting rooms. We’ve turned it into a ritual, a discipline to be checked off a list. But what my grandmother practiced was something else entirely. It was less about speaking and more about listening.
Less about asking and more about abiding. Her prayers weren’t occasional eruptions of religious fervor; they were a constant, low hum in the background of our lives, the spiritual equivalent of the earth’s magnetic field—invisible, but absolutely essential for navigation. She was building a legacy, not of things, but of atmosphere.
The Weight of Her Silence
I remember sitting in her small living room as a child buzzing with the unimportant anxieties of youth. I’d be talking, filling the space with my chatter, and she’d just listen. But her listening was active, a thing you could feel. She wasn’t just waiting for her turn to speak. She was absorbing. And then, after a pause that felt like a held breath, she’d speak a sentence that would cut straight through the noise.
It was never a lengthy sermon. It was a quiet, “Well, honey, the Lord knows all about that,” or “Let’s just take that to Him right now, shall we?” And we would. Right there, amid the Afghans and the doilies, with the television off. She would pray a simple, direct prayer that felt less like a formal address to the Almighty and more like a continued conversation He was already in the room for.
There was a weight to her silence in those moments before she prayed. It was the weight of someone shifting a burden from their own shoulders onto something sturdier. She understood something I’m only now beginning to grasp: that intercessory prayer is first an act of acknowledgment.
You have to acknowledge the burden exists, that the worry is real, and that the fear has claws. You have to hold it in your hands and feel its distressing texture before you can hand it over. She never dismissed my childish concerns. She validated them by taking them seriously enough to bring before God.
In doing so, she taught me that nothing is too small for His attention and, by extension, that I was never too small for His care. She was laying a foundation, one quiet moment at a time, for a faith that could hold weight.
The Tapestry of Names
Her prayer life was mapped out in people. Every day, in that chair by the window, she would work her way through a mental roster of names. Her children, her grandchildren, neighbors, the pastor, and missionaries she read about in magazines. It was a sacred roll call. I didn’t understand it as a child; it seemed like a monotonous task. Now, I see it as an act of fierce, creative love.
To pray for someone by name, consistently and over years, is to establish a link between their soul and heaven. It’s to declare that their story is not theirs alone, that it is being interfaced with grace behind the scenes.
I often wonder how many wrong turns I avoided and how many close calls were averted, not because of my own wisdom but because a thread she had woven years before snapped taut and pulled me back from some unseen edge. Her prayers were a form of spiritual causality, setting in motion blessings and protections that would only find their reason years later. James 5:16says,“The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” Her life was proof of that. It wasn’t a flashy fervency; it was a slow, steady burn that warmed everything in its orbit.
The Long Obedience in the Same Direction
We know the world sells us on the cult of the immediate. We want results, answers, and solutions, and we want them by yesterday. And prayer, in this frantic economy, can feel like a poor investment. You put in your requests and too often feel like you get silence in return.
My grandmother’s faith was antithetical to this. Her prayer was a long obedience in the same direction. It was farming, not fast food. You plant seeds in the soil of the unseen and you water them with faithfulness, trusting that the harvest belongs to God and His timing is a mystery we are not meant to solve.
Each time I think of Joseph in the Old Testament. His story is one of dramatic dreams, betrayal, and a stunning rise to power. But behind all of that, what was there? Years. Decades of silence in a foreign land. But let’s ask ourselves, what sustained him?
I believe it was the legacy of a faith passed down. The prayers of his father, Isaac, and his grandfather, Abraham—men who walked with God and built altars of remembrance. Those prayers were a stored-up inheritance that Joseph lived off of during the long, lean years in Egypt. He was living inside the architecture of their faith.
That’s what a praying grandparent does. They are storing up an inheritance of faith for generations they will never meet. They are planting orchards in whose shade they will never sit. It is the most selfless form of love imaginable.
The Baton in the Relay
This is where the challenge turns to us, the parents who are one day, God willing, to become the grandparents. We are the middle generation. We are running our leg of the race, and the baton we will hand off is being formed right now, in the quiet of our own private moments, or in the lack thereof.
We cannot give what we do not possess. We cannot build an architecture of prayer for our grandchildren if our own spiritual lives are built on the shaky foundation of hurry and distraction.
I’m not suggesting that you must replicate my grandmother’s life. We are not called to be curators of a museum of someone else’s faith. We are instead called to be cultivators of our own. The chair by the window might look different for us. Maybe it’s the morning commute, the early morning run, or the few minutes of quiet before the house erupts with chaos. The location is irrelevant, but the posture of the heart is everything.
This is about making a conscious choice to become a person of the unseen. To fight for that space where we can listen, where we can hold the names of our loved ones before God, and where we can join the long, slow, obedient work of building something that will outlast us.
We are so often preoccupied with the legacy of our 401(k)s, the colleges our children will attend, and the values we try to instill through words. These things have their place. But the most powerful thing we will ever do for our future grandchildren is to learn to abide.
To become so familiar with the presence of God that it seeps into the very plaster of our homes, creating an atmosphere that those who come after us will recognize, even if they can’t name it. They will feel it. A peace that doesn’t make sense. A resilience that surprises them. A sense of being guided, of being known. They will be living inside the walls we built on our knees.
The Echo in the Bones
My grandmother has been gone for many years now. The apartment is empty, the chair long gone. The tangible reminders of her fade a little more with each season. But her legacy is more potent than ever.
It’s in the instinct I have to pray for my own children when worry tries to claw its way in. It’s in the sudden, overwhelming sense of peace that will wash over me for no earthly reason in the middle of a difficult day. It’s the echo of a hymn she used to hum while she cooked, a melody that surfaces in my mind at the exact moment I need it.
She built something. Not with wood or stone, but with spirit and truth. She built a sanctuary of intercession, and I am its living inhabitant. Her prayers were the seeds, and my life is part of the harvest. This is the power of a praying grandparent. It is a power that operates in the quiet, that works across time, that defies every law of entropy and decay. It is the closest thing we have to laying up treasures in heaven and then watching as heaven, in its own mysterious ways, spills those treasures back out onto the earth in the lives of those we love.
The task, then, for us in the middle, is to pick up the trowel. To mix the mortar of faithfulness and consistency. To build, so that one day, those who come after us might feel the same startling grace of living in a house they did not build, filled with a peace they did not earn, all because someone, long ago, chose to pray by a window.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/twomeows
Emmanuel Abimbola is a creative freelance writer, blogger, and web designer. He is a devout Christian with an uncompromising faith who hails from Ondo State in Nigeria, West Africa. As a lover of kids, Emmanuel runs a small elementary school in Arigidi, Nigeria.
