I always love those movies like, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey wishes he had never been born, and an angel appears and makes his wish come true. George begins to realize how many lives he has impacted and changed just by him being in this life.
Edward Lorenz was an MIT mathematician and meteorologist. He was conducting computer simulations of weather predictions in 1961, and he found that the tiniest change in the position of his variables completely through off his calculations. This caused him to remark that “a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could spawn a hurricane in Texas”.
The Butterfly effect is about how tiny changes in big systems can have complex results. As strange as it seems. Our God is not a God of chaos, this life and our world is not made of chaos. There is connectedness. There are ripples in all we do and experience. Our actions, behaviors, words, touch all that we come in contact. Maybe some of our actions will create a storm of activity that we will not see. I find this interesting.
So let’s look at some small events that changed the world. Rosa Park, she was a civil rights activist and on Dec 1, 1955, she refused to give up her seat to a white person. She started the Civil Rights Movement, and an association called “The Montgomery Improvement Association” to organize the bus boycott. The elected Martin Luther King and the rest is history.
What about if Billy Graham had decided to not go into ministry? A Sunday school teacher led a man named, Dwight Moody to Christ, a man named Chapman was converted at a Moody teaching, then Billy Sunday was converted at a Chapman meeting, and Mordecai Ham was converted by Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham became a believer at a Ham meeting.
You don’t have to be big and important to make an impact. If a butterfly can cause an effect, they why wouldn’t a human? That means that each one of us is important, each of us has a divine purpose inside of ourselves. I’ll take it further, and say, that even our suffering has meaning and an effect. Nothing is meaningless.
I connect the Butterfly Effect with the image of a tapestry. We don’t understand the threads of life, some are gold, some are frayed, some run across the tapestry, and it looks confusing on the backside. But, one day we will see the other side and sometimes we get glimpses, but it will be beautiful and one day we will fully understand.
Remember no man is an island. Even if you move a rock, or throw a pebble in the water, it has an effect. Just a small move, sends a small puff of air.
What if you smiled today at someone in line at the store? Did you just send a whirlwind in someone’s life and another?
So, ladies, if you ever wondered if your life matters….it does!
