REFLECTIONS

Tiny Ripples

A solitary leaf tumbles gracefully down onto a pond’s mirrored stillness. It makes no waking sound though its fall broadcasts circles of tiny ripples through the pond until they fade into the water’s edge. The leaf floats about the pond for a time before it disappears beneath the surface as quietly as it came. Then as the pond returns to stillness, the vanished leaf that once interrupted its peacefulness seemed to have made no lasting difference to it at all.

Or did it?

Though ever so slightly, the water level had 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 were rearranged in ways that no one may ever see. But all within God’s plan as He shapes his world.

The leaf might be a metaphor for our own lives. Each of us comes into this world mostly unnoticed. We dwell here for a time broadcasting tiny ripples that touch the lives around us. Then we vanish from the world seeming to have made no lasting difference to it at all.

Or do we?

Just as he created the leaf, God brought you into the world to make a difference. Your life may only make a quiet ripple in this world, but a unique life was added when you entered it. And likely, more new lives are here now because of you. And think about all those other lives you’ve touched in your journey? Those lives are different than they would have been if you had not crossed their paths.

“I am a part of all I ever met,” Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in Ulysses. And because of those connections, you have become a part of all you ever meet. Although you may never see the parts you became through your connections to the world, or may never know the influence you had on other lives you touch, in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. And because of your presence here, countless numbers of tiny lives, bonded 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.

You are the light of the world,

Richard +

www.reflectingthesavior.org.

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