How Our Choices Affect Others

As recently posted in the Emma Joy Weekly Newsletter

What Your Decisions Have to Do with Others


Hey, everyone.


Today I am hoping to bring awareness to a subject many people might think flippantly about (if the majority ponder it at all). It's the subject of our choices and the ways they affect other people.


Living in close proximity to others means they are invariably affected by the choices we make. We are always influencing, whether we realize it or not and whether we care or not. And the quality of others' lives suffers or improves based upon our interactions and involvement with them and if that correspondence and influence is healthy and uplifting or destructive and careless.


If anyone depends on you, your daily health choices, financial choices, integrity choices, and honesty choices will impact his or her life in more ways than you can imagine.


A girl I have mentored lost her dad when she was fifteen due to his reckless lifestyle and drug use.


My father and his five siblings grew up without a dad present in the home (or involved in their lives) because he abandoned his role as husband and father and left the family for an adulterous relationship then moved to another state. My dad has cried to me and explained how deeply this wounded and affected him for decades--all due to one man's selfishness.


My mother's dad has refused to serve God with his life for eighty plus years and I am certain our family tree for generations would look entirely different if only he had sought the Lord diligently and lived for something beyond himself beginning from a young age.


I'm sure we could all tell stories of the people throughout our lives that have left a bitter memory in our minds or a blessed one. And I'm sure every one of us is remembered a certain way by the people we've known over the years. Whether that is a positive memory or a negative one entirely depends on the way we spoke to and acted toward them and toward others in their presence.


Legacy is a weighty topic. It's an unfortunate fact that selfishness, pride, resentment, bitterness, and lust reign in the lives of countless people. To the wise person who recognizes and can readily admit fault and take active steps to remedy what is wrong: you will make a positive imprint on the lives of anyone observing you and by your choices will influence him or her to follow in your footsteps. But to the unwise person who continually blameshifts and makes excuses for his or her behavior and words: people will learn also--and the results won't be pretty.


Every choice we make is leading us down one of two trails: wholeness or destruction. Every choice. And more choices than we might realize will inevitably impact those around us in ways that could take years and hours and hours of therapy to undo.


"A good name is to be more desired than great wealth, favor is better than silver and gold." Proverbs 22:1