“What’s your problem today, Kate?” He looks up at me where I sit perched in the lifeguard chair.

“What do you mean?”

“You just don’t seem like yourself. Usually you’re all smiling and stuff.”

Before I can respond, he gets distracted by the other kids and swims away.

How many people are influenced by our actions, our words, our facial expressions?

It’s like we’re living on a stage and the lights are so blinding that we forget we have an audience.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,” Hebrews 12:14

Actions cause reactions we will never know about.

How…when we pray, our prayers affect the battle being waged in the spiritual realms.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12

I’m at a beach Saturday night and I throw a stone out across the unblemished surface of Lake Huron, hoping for the stone to skip across it.

Waiting for the ripple effect.

The stone sinks beneath the surface, where I can’t see it, where I can’t know what it has touched or what it has moved.