For  years “the church” has gone to “church” to listen to one man/woman stand up and tell them how to live a better life, only to walk out with a puffed chest and think that we have done our “Christian duty” by listening.  Some of us have even attended many events and helped with church activities but don’t have a personal time with God.  What would life look like if we could make an “eternal ripple” (props to JHellums on that one) in peoples lives?  Wouldn’t it carry on?  That person would share it with someone else, and they would share it, and the ripple would continue to grow.  So how do we make that happen?  How is a life impacted so deeply?  I have a couple of ideas…

1.  Through a relationship.  You don’t meet someone for the first time and begin to dig deeply into their past and current life.  You don’t ask those deep penetrating questions automatically.  However, most of us don’t even go that deep after we have a great relationship with someone.  We become afraid of hurting our friendship.  I believe that a relationship is a process.  It doesn’t come overnight and it gets sticky and messy sometimes but, it is worth the wait.  The process is significant.

2.  It takes self-initiative.  It takes self-initiative on our part to stick with the relationship AND to ask and dig into the persons life.  It also takes self-initiative from that person to change!  It is up to us to encourage and stimulate that change.

3.  Patience and Effort.  It takes patience to build a relationship and it takes a whole lot of effort.  You have to work at it!  You see, most of us have patience but don’t want to put out the effort it takes to make the relationship grow, therefore, an eternal ripple is never achieved because we are not willing to dig deeper into our relationships.

This blog was inspired by personal feelings and growth in the last few months as well as the author of “Insert Title Here“, Jeremy Hellums who wrote a recent blog on the phrase “Eternal Ripple”.