The Ripple Effect of Your Decisions
I have talked about the different decisions that you make and how it affects you and those around you. But what are the ripple affects of those decisions? What happens down the road because of your choices?
There are so many ripples that happen from every decision we make, good or bad. You can throw a small pebble into a pond and watch the ripple from that action cross the whole pond. The same thing happens in our life. Small actions have a ripple throughout our whole life. My first example will be on the good ripple effect and my second example will show a bad ripple effect. The first one happened to me and the second happened to people I know.
For instance, I created a website back in 2001 called Inspiration4Everyone.comthat was going to be an inspirational site for people with maybe 10 pages of quotes on it. I had no idea where that would lead. People started coming to the site and telling me I should add this section and that section.
Then 6 months later I had over 1,000 pages in the site. Did the ripple stop there? NO not even close. Then in Sept of 2001 I found this Christian Singles site and they had a free 14 day trial. I thought well I could try it but I wasn’t going to pay for it. At the end of the 14 days I really enjoyed it but not enough to pay for it so I decided to ask the webmaster a question.
I saw that they had an affiliate program so I asked if I became a part of that would they throw in a free membership for me. All they could say was yes or no right?
Well he emailed me back letting me know that they had never done that before but would consider it depending on my traffic. I told him that the site had been up for 6 months at the time and had over 36,000 visitors in that time. He answered me back to let me know that he was making my account for free.
5 months later in Feb. was when I met Sandy on that site. We hit it off almost from day 1. We met online Feb 2nd of 2002 then talked on the phone Feb 4th for the first time. Feb 18th we set a wedding date and on March 4th we met in person for the first time.
Were we kind of crazy? Yes but we just knew this was from God. The date we set was Oct 5th, 2002 for the wedding which is the date we got married. So now here we are almost 10 years of marriage later and the ripple of that one decision to make that website is still going on.
We have a 21 month old baby boy right now. So even he is a ripple of that small decision. I quit drinking almost 5 years ago and it was because I realized that I was going to destroy my marriage if I didn’t so that too was from the ripple of creating that one website.
It is crazy when you look back on your life and you see how a small ripple can effect your life in such a big way. There are so many things that could have been different if I didn’t create that site. I know in my heart that I would have never met Sandy and I wouldn’t have had Lil Chris now. The site is still the same design as it was back then. I guess keeping it looking the same helps me not forget how we got here.
So what small things in your life have led you to right where you are? Bad things can have a ripple effect too which is what usually happens. Maybe you start hanging around the wrong kind of friends and you are in high school. All your life you looked forward to doing great things and going to college and then building your career.
So you start hanging with a new group of friends who like to party a lot so you eventually give in and start partying all the time. Your grades start to drop until you are failing high school. Now you can’t get into the college you want so you settle for a different college.
Now you find even more trouble in college because of hanging out with more people who just don’t care and then eventually you get into some kind of crime. Well this is all happening as an adult so there is no sealing your records. Then your whole career choice is gone because maybe you can’t have anything wrong in the past for your career. Now what?
All this started when you became friends with people who brought you to their level. This happens all the time with people. These new people look like fun and at first they are fun to you but over time the ripple effect of being around them takes a toll on your entire life until you don’t even know who you are anymore.
Don’t let the ripple effect happen to you with bad choices. It probably isn’t the bad choices themselves because we can overcome one bad choice usually but then you cover up the bad choice with another bad choice then another until you your whole life is a mask of coverups. You can’t live that way for too long before you fall apart.
Does this mean life is over? It depends what kind of choices you made. Maybe those choices led you to prison? Well either do your time and get out or if you have life then do your time in prison and try to help others who are getting out to not make the same choices that you have made.
Either way your choices will catch up to you. Whether they are good or bad choices, the choices you make today have a ripple effect on your tomorrow. The choices you made in your past had the ripple effect to get you in your situation that you are in right now. For some people that is a good ripple effect and for others it is a bad ripple effect.
So at this point what can you do? You need to from this point change your ripple effect by starting to make the right decisions. It won’t be easy and it may take you years to overcome some of the ripples but over time you can make it happen. My next blog will be part 4 called Second Chances.
Ask God to give you the courage to change direction if you are in a bad ripple effect time right now. Ask him to show you where you need to change and where you need to stay the same. Ask him to heal your heart from your ripple effects so that you can move forward in Faith. Ask him to be with you as you take steps forward.
Be Inspired or Be Left Behind!
Chris Benton