generations

Was looking at some old pictures today, of my grandparents when they were newly married and in missionary training in Mexico, of my dad when he was a college kid coming out of the jungles of Bolivia to go to college in the frozen north of the U.S.. I looked at my mom's wedding book, at the program from their wedding, the songs picked, the Scriptures read. And their faces, their choices, their ways of thinking and being and treating one another... all of this got me thinking about how tremendously true it is that our choices have untraceable ripples.

The way my grandparents chose to live, chose to be within their family, their personalities and ways of looking at the world... these things have permeated my life through my father. They're a part of who I am too, or they've shaped me to resist them. They've shaped so many things. Who I want to be and who I don't want to be, what I think is important and what I have decided is not important. And back and back you could go, and see why my grandparents turned out as they did, and theirs before them, and back and back...

What a tremendous plan God has. Absolutely tremendous and so incredibly, incredibly intricate. The details He has to orchestrate to shape personalities, the events that individuals experience as so so big in their lives, and then they move on, and either remember or forget, and die. But their reactions, the results, the Selves they could never have consciously put together on their own.... these have infinite effects.

The Sara Groves song "Generations" actually spontaneously started playing in another room of the house--by someone else's choice, not mine, right after I'd been looking through these pictures and thinking about this. "Remind me of this with every decision...generations will reap what I sow... I could pass on a curse or a blessing to those I will never know..."

To me right now this is a reminder that even when I may feel there is no one here for me to lead by example, no one for me to be an example to or to help or consistently serve, still I am affecting someone. Of course I am responsible to God, but I AM having an impact on people, too--the 'audience' that will be affected somehow so many years from now, by who I choose to be. I choose to be a Christ-follower in these moments, to let God shape me in these moments that will add up to years, because it is Right. But it's good to know too that it goes even beyond Him and me.

I want to pass on a blessing somehow by being God's, by being joyful, by being a lover of Jesus, by loving others deeply. That's going to be used somehow. It's a thread that God can pick up and weave into His delicate, intricate, tremendous and beautiful Plan. This whole thought is so crazy-amazing.