Our Touch

One of the great trends that is happening today is the “pay it forward” trend.  You know how it works … if someone does a kindness for you, you pass it along to someone else who crosses your path.  Here’s a great video to illustrate that.

Mr. Buechner said it this way:

"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”

~Frederick Beuchner – The Hungering Dark

You mean my simple act of kindness could travel all the way around the world?  Absolutely true. 

In evangelistic church circles this has been played out time and again.  A famous missionary by the name of Harmon F. Schmelzenbach felt called to Africa.  Through many trials and hardships he and his wife were finally able to establish a foothold for spreading Christianity.  Now, three generations later his descendants are still spreading the work of Harmon, and the influence has spread far beyond that first primitive village in Swaziland.

Who can guess where the influence stops?  Who can guess where the one good deed that started on Tuesday will end, and will it ever end? 

Look at your own life.  What was instilled into you as a young child that you still pass down?  Is it good?  Is it profitable to others? 

You do see that we pass good stuff along and we pass bad stuff along. 

     Bad ideologies

          Bad habits

               Bad insights

The point is this … Mr. Beuchner understood that evil can be passed along, which he refers to as the “trembling”. 

But we want to pass along the good, the profitable, the esteeming, the encouraging and the nurturing.

And sometimes we pass it along …

 -In words

 -In songs

 -In a financial contribution

 -In food for a poverty-stricken country

 -In technology that opens whole vistas of opportunities

 -In fresh water supply as the Bill Gates Foundation does

 -In farming techniques

 -In literature printed in the language of the land

 -In building a building in some remote area that becomes a church or a place of learning, or a hospital of healing

You see what is happening here?  One action – one simply action has the reciprocal effect of paying it forward.  The gift keeps on giving.

It is your touch, your gift, your word that made a difference.

Kind of makes us want to find ways to do that often, doesn't it?

P Michael Biggs

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