Eternal Impact

Two years ago, I heard a sermon about the grace of showing gratitude to those who have made positive impacts in one’s life. (By the way, “grace” and “gratitude” comes from the same root word.)

I was touched by that message. I went home and made a list of all the dear folks who had left their imprints in my life and helped sculpture me the way I am.

Unfortunately, there were those, like my parents and an awesome high school teacher, who had passed on, and to whom I was way too late to express my gratitude. This, in itself, is a lesson: show gratitude and love, and say sorry if that's necessary, while we still can.

For each of those whom I wanted to thank and who were still around, I painted a watercolour card and wrote my heartfelt sentiments. I mailed them my expressions of gratitude.

I never anticipated the kind of responses I received.

People wrote me back to thank me for my thoughtfulness. Some expressed their near-shock and oblivion that they had, in any way, made a difference in my life.

The second kind of response certainly highlights for me that, in living out my life, I may never know where my influence, positive or negative, begins and where it ends.

That’s an awesome thought! That’s a frightful notion!

As if how I conduct my life is likened to the “butterfly effect” which impacts lives and shapes courses of events here and now, in the future and far, far away.

Well, that’s exactly how my parents taught me to live. And, that’s exactly how Jesus taught us to live.

Howsoever we live our lives in the here and now inevitably ripples eternal impacts on others, those who are close to us, those whom we barely know, and those whom we do not know. And, most frightening of all, for the most part, we do not and will never know whom will be affected and the nature of those impacts.

Am I a history-maker?

Yes and no.

“No man is an island,” John Donne was right in saying that. We all live in a community where one life is daily shaped by other lives, as the balls on a billiards table. In that sense, we are able to exert, intentionally, unintentionally, or subconsciously, both positive and negative influences on one another. Likewise, I am daily shaped by those with whom I do life together.

Viewed this way, we write the next chapter of our collective memoir together.

So, am I a history-maker? Or, are we making history together?

Or, would we want to invite the Author of Life to co-write our story.

What kind of story would we like to write? What kind of history would we like to make?

That’s the bigger question, a rhetorical one, that begs an answer which helps make this life and the next heaven or hell.

Yes. Who I am and how I live may impact others is an awesome thought and a frightful notion, and it deserves my daily reflective and honest attention.