We all have people in our lives who inspire us. People who teach us, guide us, encourage us, and love us. We can all point to a person in our past, and hopefully our present, who showed us by the way they walk through life what it means to chase grace.
The person who showed, not by words, but by actions what it means to pursue the Lord with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.
The person who teaches you that there is peace to be found in the midst of war and there is something to love about every heart and every person whose heart is beating.
The person who proves that even on the darkest night there is light and there is hope and there is joy.
The person who showed you how to forgive when anger was the much easier option.
The person who is unrelenting in their drive to show compassion in a world where hate and divisiveness seem to take precedence…
My hope is that as you read this, someone comes into your mind. Your person. The one who taught you these things, showed you the love of Christ, and led you into a relationship with the One who intentionally molded every piece of you.
Go be that person.
Think about how different your life would be without that person. The person who demonstrated what it means to follow Christ. Whether their guidance was known to them or not, they impacted your life simply by living the life God meant for them to live.
In the same way, you may never know the lives you touch or the impact you make on someone’s walk with Jesus, but I think that’s absolutely beautiful. We don’t live for God in order to be praised by other people, we live for God because we have been transformed by his presence in our lives and want desperately to share the unchanging love he offers to everyone around us. The impact we, as followers of Christ, have on someone stems only from our God’s ability to break through into that person’s heart and make himself known.
I say all this to make this one point: You can be the very person you look to as an example of what it looks like to follow Christ because you know the very same joy.
The God that captured their heart and set them on their journey to forever chase His grace is the same God who has in turn captured yours. Whether the person you are thinking of knows the impact they had on your faith or not, God used them to bring you to Him. He used their obedience in living for Him to bring another soul back home…And He can use you to do the same.
You can be that person. Live your faith loud, love unceasingly, be compassionate, and run unashamed toward the One who met you wherever you were when your own journey began. You never know who might be watching.