Your Impact Reaches Beyond What You See. I have had an amazing journey through mountaintops and the deepest valleys. Through it all, God kept investing in me in ways I didn’t always understand, and for a purpose I couldn’t always see. I wanted to share that journey with you.
We are each incredible creatures, designed by a God who loves us unconditionally, each with unique talents and purpose. In our own way, each of us can change the world around us. That may sound like an overstatement, but it is true. Not just the world around us, but the world that has yet to be. A future we will never experience.
You may never know how much your life mattered to someone else.
A conversation you barely remember. Encouragement you offered when someone was ready to quit. A moment when you paused, listened, and helped someone feel less alone. We must acknowledge not the life we planned, but the life we received. We plan in straight lines, but we live in detours.
“The Life I Received” – Chapter 3
What if those moments reach further than you will ever see?
Each Life Has a Sound
However, every life makes a sound.
The sound may not be loud. You may not recognize it at the time. It may be nothing more than a sentence spoken to a discouraged person, a meal shared with someone who felt invisible, a lesson passed to a student, a business skill taught to someone trying to survive, or a stubborn decision to keep loving after loss.
But that sound moves outward. It touches people. Those people touch others. An ordinary action becomes a seed. A seed becomes a tree. A tree drops fruit. Fruit carries more seeds. Long after the original act is forgotten, the echo continues.” – Introduction
That question is at the heart of my book, Echoes Through Eternity: Lessons from an Ordinary Life, now available through Amazon.
Many of you have walked alongside me on this blog. This book brings together years of those reflections into a broader conversation about faith, purpose, grief, courage, and the influence we have on other people’s lives.
“A Tree Does not Hear Its Own Growth” – Chapter 6
Inside, I share lessons from business, service in developing countries, personal loss, and the everyday work of following Christ. Stories of people whose determination reshaped my understanding of purpose, and encounters that taught me how easily we can walk past an opportunity to make a difference.
That Sound Has an Echo
If you have ever wondered whether your work matters, how to move forward after loss, or what God might still have for you in this season of life, I wrote these pages with you in mind.
“Whose Life Are You Going to Change?” – Chapter 12
My hope is that you will recognize your story here—and find encouragement to love well, act courageously, and use what God has placed in your hands today. God lives in the moments. Dramatic moments don’t change lives; the steady drumbeat of a life well lived does.
What echo will your life leave behind?
I invite you to explore Echoes Through Eternity: Lessons from an Ordinary Life. Read the description, try a sample if available, and see whether these pages speak to the questions you carry.
My goal in life, and yours, should be to enrich the life of those we touch. Not through money, power, and fame, but through compassion, love, and grace.
“Echo Through Eternity” – Chapter 20
Find it on Amazon – for a limited time the Kindle version is free.
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Today, I’m asking myself whether I can be trusted with much. Do I look at a subset of gifts God has given me and determine that they are the only ones God cares about, or do I include all of the blessings and attributes of my existence to serve God? I think I have a tendency to pick and choose.
Life turns and sprints away; I often come across quotes worth remembering—not simply because they inspire me, but because they tell me something true. They remind me of the basic truths I need to put into practice, especially when life asks more of me than I feel ready to give.
Finding the right path in life can seem like looking for Waldo. But God looks at it differently.
In my more than seventy-five years, I find it interesting that I spent fifty years doing what I love, for the most part, yet I remember data points but not the effort it took to achieve them. I have spent over thirteen thousand days perfecting my craft, and I recall facts, but most of the emotion has been lost to time. Yet a chance meeting with a stranger decades ago remains vivid in my mind. His need outweighed my inconvenience. The emotion of that encounter is real, as if it happened yesterday. I can still see his eyes. The pain in them was deeper than anything I had experienced. Later in life, I, too, would have his eyes. I, too, would know what it is like to feel emotional pain that defies words.
I sometimes feel invisible. By nature, I’m a worker bee. I prefer to stay in the background. When the spotlight is on me, I’m uncomfortable. I find it hard to accept a compliment. To me, it’s not about humility; it’s about being truthful. It’s not about lacking self-confidence; it’s about being realistic. I am who I am: nothing extraordinary. I can do what God created me to do.
This morning, I found myself thinking about how God interacts with me through the Holy Spirit, prodding me toward a life worth living. My mind slowly turned to why He puts certain people in my life—often people with problems.
Not every distraction is bad. Some of the most dangerous distractions are worthwhile things that slowly consume the attention meant for something else. We do not have to be doing something wrong to find ourselves neglecting what God has called us to do. Sometimes we are simply doing too much of something good.
Here are the four important lessons I have learned in life.
I finished writing a book this week. It took more than two years. It wasn’t a biography or a memoir. I didn’t write about my achievements. It was about how I became me, about what happened in my life that transformed me and shaped me into who I am today.