It’s a well-known poem;
‘Drop a pebble in the water: just a splash, and it is gone; but there’s half-a-hundred ripples, circling on and on and on’.
The choices we make have an impact. There have not been many times in my life that I have been called ‘first’, nor did I previously think much of the word ‘impact’ when it came to my choices. Why would anything I did or had to say have a reason to change or challenge someone else?
I once sketched a picture of a smiling African child and gave it away to a friend on her way to Mali with a note to the equivalent of, ‘you’re the missionary, not me’. The gesture may have been encouraging, but I was out of line. Why? Because like many people, my understanding of how God chooses who he uses was characterised by an impossible standard of Mother Theresa, not a stubborn Moses.
When God called my name when I was fourteen, it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t pity he had taken on a dry and useless stone stuck too far from the water’s edge. He was looking for a projectile; a pebble to create ripples in a wider broken family, to relate to a youth enduring family-breakdown, to teach a refugee a few words in English, to encourage a homeless girl outside McDonalds, to challenge, to love, to serve.
The choices we make have an impact. Over the past eighteen months God has used not just my obedience but my anxiety, my stubbornness, and my blatant defiance to lead me into work I never qualified myself as a Christian, or a teacher, to do. But I don’t believe I am a fraud because of it. We are no more justified in stepping ourselves down from what God asks of us, as we are in telling him he can have our hearts …but not our lives. To be working ‘On Track’ this year is what’s in the name; to be learning along the way to recognise, to appreciate and too long to see the ripples of my words, my actions, my faith.
‘For my plans are not like your plans and my ways are not like your ways…’
Isaiah 55:8-9
We have a God who is in the business of tee-ing up change and creating ripples. And it’s a privilege to be a pebble in his hands.
