Tacos and Influence

Sometimes simple lessons of life are learned from simple expressions of children. The year was 1988. It happened at meal time when my second son was about five years old. The meal being served was tacos. Since I was the parent at hand, I asked a simple question about how he might like his tacos prepared. His simple response went like this: "I don't want mine right now. First, I want to see how you fix yours, Daddy."

At that moment, a rather profound, but maybe simple, thought flashed into my mind like neon lights. The power of influence. Nobody lives to themselves and nobody dies to themselves. Not even Dad when fixing tacos.

However limited or extended our contact is with somebody else, we are constantly exerting an influence, whether good or bad. By what we do and say, by how we act and react , we are impressing or depressing other people. Since all of life, including unconscious influence, will be judged by God, we ought to be concerned about our influence. That should be a given.

It is entirely possible for our actions to be misread, and our influence can be negative even though our intentions were good. Someone may hear a snatch of our innocent conversation and jump to a wrong conclusion, while the whole conversation would have created a different impression and response. So, influence should really be weighed by the whole scope of our lives.

This does not mean that brief contacts are unimportant at all. Much of our life is filled with fleeting associations with others. Whoever it is that we meet, however brief or extended the meet may be, we should aim at being genuinely Christian.

It should be remembered that influence is not the same as image. It's a fact that some people are concerned about their friendships because they want to project some kind of an acceptable image. Image is just a misnomer because all it's good for is to show something that a person is really not. Trying to sell yourself as a bar of gold when you're just a block of brass doesn't work very well in the long run. Somebody will eventually figure it out.

It is a lesson that needs to be learned. We should never aim to gull people in order to take advantage of them. We should never pretend to be better Christians than we really are. We should never pretend to be more holy than we really are. What we should be doing is actually quite simple. In all the going-ons with the "somebodies" in our life, we should be accepting, loving, understanding, forgiving and encouraging people to find "the Way." I say that only then does influence really make a difference.

And to think - a simple lesson from a five year old son getting ready to watch his Dad fix tacos - reminded me again about the power of influence. It's stayed with me all these years. That's the way life is - little things are important, even influence. But the end result of influence is never small or insignificant. It lends itself to every relationship of our lives - yes, even when preparing tacos around the kitchen table at family meal time.

It's not about image - it's about influence. And yes, you can believe that every time I fix and eat tacos, I think about influence and wonder who's watching me. I might just be having some influence on someone for life - in ways that I don't even know.