The Ripple Effect.

It has been an extremely rain spring. Our communities have suffered from flooding and even tornadoes. The damage is widespread. Exactly how widespread I did not realize until on vacation to New York state and Canada recently.

You've seen the ripple effect of dropping a pebble into water?  It's real and on a much grander scale than I was consciously aware of before this vacation.  All those many raindrops that have fallen at home have a ripple effect. They gather as runoff and flood our streams and rivers. They flooded our campsite at Lake Loramie State Park a couple weeks back. They flooded nearby St. Marys, Ohio and other communities. A majority of area farmers have not been able to get into their fields. June 10th is the deadline for planting corn and a lot of farmers will not make it.

These are the facts as we know them to be. We live these facts and so they are very much real to us. We pray for those affected locally ... but do we consider the ripple effects of the rain in our area?

So, your thoughts may have drifted to rising prices for corn and other crops being impacted. Higher prices looming in grocery stores, restaurants and so on. But these are more immediate ripple effects.

While in New York and Canada this past week we witnessed shore line flooding of Lake Ontario that is having devastating effects. In fact, Lake Ontario is at record levels.  What dos this have to do with rainfall totals in Northwest Ohio?

Well, we live in the Lake Erie watershed meaning our streams and rivers carry water to Lake Erie. Lake Erie, via the Niagara River and the Niagara Falls drains into ... Lake Ontario. The rains we have endured here in NW Ohio are contributing to the record levels of Lake Ontario.

In Youngstown, NY the head of the local boating club / marina stated people were building docks upon docks upon docks to maintain access to their houseboats and boats. There is sandbagging taking place on shoreline properties trying to keep the waters at bay.  We witnessed boat houses and even houses under water.

The story of dropping a pebble in a pond and its ripple effects is a profound one. We are seeing it play out in real life on a much grander scale. The point here is that any action taken has a ripple effect. We often see the immediate rewards ... and or ... consequences of our actions, but do we consider the wider ranging and longer term impact our actions can have?

It might take a dramatic example to drive home this point to its fullest.  Say a soldier leading a patrol decides to take the left fork in a road instead of the right fork.  The left fork sees them safely through, but had they taken the right fork they would have walked into an ambush.  That one decision saved lives. In the immediate, the lives of the soldiers on that patrol were saved, but also the lives of their future children, grandchildren and possibly countless generations. That's one helluva ripple effect, is it not?

Did the soldier leading the patrol ever know the immediate or long tern ripple effect of his decision to go left instead of right? So, every decision we make has the potential to dramatically change lives: ours and others for generations to come.

I was once told a soccer player makes 3 decisions per second. I thought that absurd at first. Upon further consideration I came to realize this is a realistic number and might even be underestimated.  Think about it in this context: you are sleeping and the alarm goes off. Open your eyes? Turn the alarm off?  Hit snooze? Get up? Roll over and go back to sleep? That's 7 decisions in the first instance of conscious awareness of the day. In a soccer match this equates 16,200 decisions. If we consider a person sleeps 8 hours a day the number of decisions in a typical day would be nearly 175,000 decisions per day. Each of those decisions have immediate and long term impacts.  Each of those decisions have the power to change lives: yours and countless others.  That's pretty heady stuff, don't you think?