The Ripple Effect: How Our Choices Impact the World

I’ve been thinking a lot about “impact” lately. 

What impact we have on the world around us… what impact the world has on us. Sometimes, I’m blown away when I think about the way a decision I made has ripple effects on other people – many whom I don’t even know. 

When, as a 19-year-old, I set out to Texas to work at a summer camp that few had ever heard of… I had no idea that it would mark the beginning of a 20 year relationship between that camp and the campus ministry I was part of. No idea that college students today would be heading to Texas for the summer, just like I did years ago. 

It’s a reminder that we don’t generally make decisions in isolation. Usually our actions, our choices…they can make waves that have a further reaching impact than we often realize in the moment. And so much of the time, we don’t even know what that impact may be. 

Our decision to foster, to move to Columbia, for me to start working at a non-profit, for us to embark on a real estate/affordable housing business with our friends, what church we chose…I can trace the threads of impact that each of those decisions can/will make in other people’s lives. 

And yet, I believe, there’s also some mix of God’s sovereignty in all of it. It’s complicated. How our choices weave together with this peace that assures me: this is how it was supposed to be. 

It maybe makes the decisions feel less weighty while also reminding me that what we do does matter. Our choices do impact others, even if we’d like to pretend like they don’t. There can be a purpose beyond me that I never get to know about. I love that. And maybe I also hate it. 

We can’t live in isolation. 

We were never meant to. 

We are beings who are deeply impacted by the choices others make on a daily basis, whether we realize it or not. We are beings who deeply impact others by the choices we make, whether we realize it or not. 

There’s a tension we must live in – feeling the weight of responsibility, but also knowing other folks also have agency, and that the Triune God reigns supreme. 

But we aren’t exempt from responsibility. Our choices matter, despite how much we may try to convince ourselves that they don’t, or that the part we play is too insignificant to mean much. 

Your role is significant. 

Written only for you, for such a time as this. 

Only you can decide to do that and have it influence them in that way. Only you can refrain from that, and it will have implications for your family for generations to come. 

Only you.