REFLECTIONS
November 9, 2008
 
 
so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
Romans 12:5
 
                                                                                                      
Ripples
           
A solitary leaf falls tenderly onto the pond’s mirrored stillness. The leaf makes no awakening sound though it broadcasts circular ripples that grow until they can be seen no more. The leaf floats about for a time before vanishing beneath the water’s surface as quietly as it came. And as the pond returns into its mirrored stillness, the leaf that once interrupted the silence vanishes, seemingly to have made no difference at all. 
Or did it?
            Though ever so slightly, the water level had been changed. Something beneath the waterline will never be the same. And the countless numbers of tiny drops that bond into one large body of stillness have been rearranged in ways that no one may ever see. But all within God’s plan as He shapes his world.
            So it is with our own lives. Each of us comes into this world mostly unnoticed. We live here for a time broadcasting ripples that touch the lives around us. Then just as the leaf, we vanish leaving the world as if we had never come into it at all.
Or do we?
I think about Mema and how the ripples of her life broadcast the love of God to the many that passed through her Sunday school classes. Mine is the last generation to witness the way lives were reshaped by her teachings. And now those lives are making ripples—ripples whose source may go unseen, but it’s not the source that matters. They are ripples that are leaving a mark on the world today.
And I think of PaPa and how his ripples nourished my life. I feel them in the goals I set and the choices I make; and I see them before me in the lives of my children. His ripples touch the way they work to provide for their families. His ripples are visible in the integrity of their lives. And his ripples reach into their souls in the depth of their love for others.
Each life is a solitary leaf that in some small way shapes the world.
And that is why He made us.
 
“You are the light of the world,”
Richard Ì
 

www.reflectingthesavior.org.


Click here for Printer Friendly Version