the One who has had the greatest impact on me

At my Conversations, Reflections and Meditations blog, I have been writing posts for a challenge called, "30 days of me."  Today's challenge was "someone or something that has the biggest impact on you."  Here is what I wrote:

30 days of me: day 7: someone or something that has the biggest impact on you.


I love my husband. I love my children and their spouses. I love my friends and my relatives, present and past. I respect and honor past teachers, pastors, employers, and others. I can honestly say that many, many of these people have impacted me in a variety of ways. Some of them have impacted me greatly. (You can discover more specific details about the impacts of some of them on me, if you look through the things I've written on my Conversations, Reflections and Meditations website).

I have also been impacted by writers and filmmakers, poets and artists, and others I haven't met personally, but whose works have had a deep influence on my life. I have no doubt that some of the people who will read this post are included in my long list of people who have impacted my life!

I have been impacted by experiences, by places I've been, and things I've seen. The wonders of creation. Observing animals and other creatures. Miracles. Small things that contain the seeds of great ideas. I have always experienced life as an adventure, an exploration, as lifelong learning and growing and changing.

But beneath and around and above and within all these things is the One who has impacted me the most. The One who is the source and the final fulfillment of everything. For a very long time I beheld this one in a "knowledge about" kind of way. But as my life has moved along, I have found my knowing about is moving more and more into relationship, into real knowing. It hasn't been an easy journey.

As an explorer, learner, adventurer, I tend to ask questions, doubt what I am told, look for the truth. Unwilling, often unable, to easily accept what others tell me I should believe, or what they say is the truth. I'm a child of the twentieth century, of a time of belief and trust in scientific thought, of rationalism and progress. But too often its promises seem to fail. Too often it feels empty despite all its intellectual wonder.

And into these cracks, into these empty spaces, has moved this One who promises to fill in the emptiness and disappointment, who offers Truth and Life that goes beyond the promises of the world I have grown up in. I have struggled with Him, questioned, wondered, sought. I am still on that path, and always will be to some degree.

But I am knowing Him more and more. I know Him as Truth and Life, as the Way I have been seeking. I am learning to focus more and more on Him, and less and less on the things that people have claimed about Him and built around Him.

A couple of millenia ago, one of His followers created a word picture describing Him. I have read those words over and over, pondered that picture, wondering what it might really mean. And the longer and the more I am coming to know Him, the more I am understanding the immensity and wonder of who He is, as these words describe Him:

"He is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over [is the firstborn of ] all creation. He is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth.... Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began and he holds all creation together...

For God in all his fulness was pleased to live in Christ, and by him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of his blood on the cross... in his own human body. As a result, he has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault...

God's secret plan... is Christ himself. In him lie hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge... For in Christ the fulness of God lives in a human body, and you are complete through your union with Christ."

He has, above all people and all things, had the biggest impact on me. Will you let Him impact you? Ask Him. He will.