Parenting & Family Quote by Richard Adams

"Our children's children will hear a good story" is a line that smuggles a whole worldview into nine plain words: the real payoff of what we do now isn't meant for us, or even for our kids, but for an audience so far down the chain they can only be imagined. As a clergyman, Richard Adams is working in a register where time is always layered. Faith communities are built on inherited narratives - scripture, testimony, parable - and the sentence quietly argues that legacy is not just material (land, money, security) but narrative. What endures is meaning, packaged in a form that survives retelling.

The phrasing matters. "Will hear" avoids the ego of "will remember us". Hearing is communal and secondhand; it implies mediation, tradition, someone choosing to pass the tale along. That shifts attention from heroics to stewardship. The "good" is doing double duty: morally good, yes, but also good in the storyteller's sense - coherent, gripping, worth repeating. There's an almost pastoral pragmatism here: live in such a way that the story doesn't curdle into warning or scandal.

The subtext is both consolation and pressure. Consolation, because it releases you from needing immediate vindication; pressure, because it suggests your life is already being edited for the future. In religious context, that's accountability without the courtroom: the judgment is whether your actions become a sustaining myth or an awkward footnote no one wants to recount.