Last year, and friend and I had gone up to the mountains for a day trip and decided to just go wherever our intuition took us. We ended up on a dock sitting over Lake Dillion, watching as it began to rain.

When I would look up into the sky, it was impossible to perceive just where the raindrop came from, how it was formed. Even when it fell, one wouldn’t have noticed, had not there been thousands of these drops paratrooping together to the earth’s surface. But the point at which they were most noticeable was when the hit this lake.

Then a peculiar thing happened.

A drop of water would make contact with this huge mass of similar water, held to the earth by an invisible force. And this mass of water was affected. At the point of contact, the drop would fall in — and then bounce back up again in rebellion against the invisible force. And suddenly, other undifferentiated drops of water would begin to move with it, creating sort of a circle around his point in timespace. With all the invisible drops from the sky falling together into this juggernaut of a lake, though, the lake began to dance.

Of course, this doesn’t seem miraculous to us because we see it all the time. And maybe my point today isn’t even really about the miracles of physics. You see, I’m fascinated by these raindrops not only because they demonstrate an instance of order, beauty, and stability of expectation in our universe. What fascinates me even more is what this illustrates about human persuasion.

In the world of humans, there is a huge mass of people with a variety of worldviews. A combination of varying worldviews creates a fluid, dancing lake.

Worldviews interact with each other, bounce off each other, like molecules of water in a lake.

Without any homogeneity of worldview, a society isn’t propelled any real direction. It stays the same — or worse, our opinions evaporate into apathy. Even worse, that apathy may, without disruption, devolve into a lack of movement at all — rendering a stale body of water infested by a gluttonous need to gain power and control to the detriment of life in the ecosystem.

With too much homogeneity, it becomes a raging river, destroying any force that comes against it, until all are conformed to it, often against their will. (Perhaps the goal is to have just the right amount of unity in all the right places, yet still allowing the freedom to hold an unpopular view.)

Some societies are fluid and diverse. Some are apathetic and distracted. All of them are full of water that’s been immersed in the lake for months and months.

But those raindrops — they sure know how to make a body dance.

These raindrops, of course, represent leaders. Leaders are the ones who, for whatever reason, can see a society with a bird’s eye view. They are then compelled to engage with that society in a way that will, well, make waves.

But true leaders also understand the limits of their influence. They are only tiny drops. They need other like-minded leaders to create any meaningful movement in society; otherwise, they’re hopeless bystanders who, by refusing to leverage their power for good, in a sense, consent to the devolution and decay of a society.

So how can a leader be influential?

I’ll answer this question by breaking it down into three:

1) Where are leaders most influential?

When we look at a raindrop, we see the water this is moved the most is that which is directly adjacent to the point of impact. In the same way, no matter how well-known or famous a leader is, the people who will be most profoundly affected by him or her are the people he interacts with in-person on a daily basis.

In the same way, the farther out from the raindrop you look, the more the waves become a little less defined — a little blurrier, a little small in amplitude, and once again the wave soon surrenders to apathy.

The hardest part for me is this: the more people who hear what you have to say, the less people who seem to hear it.

As a leader, the more your message gets out, the more it seems to become distorted; misinterpreted; misunderstood. Your message no longer becomes your message. People come from all different contexts to hear the words you say, but the connotations and associations are all different. When I talk about my father, people with negative father-experiences may cringe without knowing a thing about my father (who is a very honest man). When I talk about a certain politically-charged issue, coming from a certain background on it, each of my friends comes from a slightly different worldview, knowledge of data and statistics, knowledge of friends affected by the issue, and so on.

This, I believe, is one reason most of us hate politics, and we avoid discussing them. It often turns into an argument, because we’re speaking completely different languages. Unless you take the time to know me well, you will always hear something different from what I ‘m saying — and vice versa. Unless you brave the waves right next to me (for instance, taking the time to read my lengthy essays and not just my watered-down, 14-character tweets), you won’t be moved. And neither will I. And neither will society. Until we decide to be profoundly affected by other people’s pain, victories, experiences, and worldviews… society will never move. Because society is made up solely of a bunch of raindrops just like us. Is it not?

This is also one reason your impact on your family or roommates, for example, is so powerful. You could be the most profound political advocate in your community — fighting for better healthcare for the sick, better education for the low-income, and more opportunity for the marginalized. And yet, if you are not making time for your children, or especially your significant other, or your aging parents, what fruit will this have? Not only 5 years down the road, but generations from now?

The same goes for your immediate work group. I have been in environments in which gossip, foul language, and crude joking have absolutely poisoned the culture. This impacts not only workmates, but customers and clients in a profound and complex way.

What kind of waves will me make? And will we join in on the negative waves, or decide that the gossip stops at us?

2) What is the net scope of influence of a leader?

Our relationships with our family, friends, and neighbors are profound. Even a smile toward someone on the bus, starting a conversation with someone in line at the grocery store, or a generous tip and an encouraging note at a restaurant can save a life, or give someone just the amount of hope they need to keep going in whatever they’re facing.

And yet, these small interactions are far from systematized. We don’t plan chance meetings with old high school friends. These are impactful, but there is a different kind of intentionality in leadership — that is, what I would call building a platform.

Let’s say I want to be influential to produce change in the Christian Church in the United States (which I do). How do I build a platform there? How do I build trust and find a way to speak into people’s lives? I’ve found that, if you ever want to change a heart (or a group of hearts), you must do two things:

  1. Meet people right where they are
  2. Care enough to bring them somewhere even greater.

One of the ways I’ve attempted to do so is by writing a devotional book for my local church. My goal was to encourage three things: (1) For people to turn away from noise in their life distracting them from God, (2) to hear God’s voice and act on it, and (3) To become more Bible-literate and spend more time reading the primary source of the faith, rather than only hearing God’s voice from secondary sources such as pastors and podcasts and social media bites (a blurry raindrop-wave in themselves).

I distributed over 100 copies into the hands of people in my community, whether they went to my church or not. Through writing, I was able to “scale” my influence. In a conversation with a friend, only one person hears what I say. With a book, the scope of my influence is far less limited.

If I can teach myself to speak to a broad audience, meeting a variety of people from different backgrounds and speaking their language, I can strategically impact hundreds — realistically, thousands — of people I have never met.

3) How can these two measures of impact be optimized?

And yet, the Raindrop Effect still stands: My message will be clearest and my impact most profound with the people directly around me. I have personally been profoundly impacted by certain authors I’ve read — because of one book I read at one time in my life — but not in the same way I’ve been impacted by the enduring presence of my mother and father and brother.

So how can one optimize his influence? Should she simply “bloom where he’s planted” and focus solely on the people around her? She could also take it to the other extreme: reaching out to a community in a foreign country without ever keeping in touch with old friends.

Or does the sweet spot lie somewhere in between?

I would venture to guess the latter.

As a Christian, I consider Jesus to be my primary reference point of a live well-lived. (After all, my belief is that He lived a perfect life!) In fact, this is not only my belief; how else would a low-income — and often homeless — man who lived to be only 33 still be known, adored, and often worshipped today by over 3 billion people, over 2,000 years after his birth?

This man was onto something. He concerned himself with his mother and brothers, but no less than he concerned himself with those who shared His vision (Matthew 12:49). He concerned himself not only with the political and religious injustices of his time in general, but never hesitated to stop along the street when he saw an individual person with a disability to help them find freedom from this injustice. Not only did He take time out of his broader societal activism to concern himself with one person — He urged those around him to take up the same responsibility, taking away any excuses they had and even assuring His followers that they could and would do far greater things than He Himself ever did (John 14:12).

Jesus invested specifically and strategically into three men: Peter, James, and John. And yet, we also see him commissioning “the 72” — a larger group of disciples with whom He did not have the luxury of spending every day, but who were dedicated enough to continue His work. Indeed, these men, and the men His disciples discipled, collectively had a great impact.

The way Jesus structured His life produced not only waves around Himself, but more raindrops to make waves… until society danced with joy.

That joy was made complete in this:
that only and sufficiently in the Kingdom of God —
made manifest “on earth as is is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10) —
could we find ultimate, real, and complete
hope, justice, and joy,
healing, unity, and fulfillment,
wisdom, skill, and maturity.

Of course, the main reason Jesus made our world dance was not because He was strategic.

It was because He had an intimate relationship with the God of the universe.

It is only because Jesus died on the cross that we, too, have this access to our Father! We can speak directly to God. We can boldly approach His throne to receive mercy and grace. Because of Jesus, and only because of Jesus, our God isn’t defeated or surprised by the hidden evils of our hearts — nor does He let it continue in us: He sees the best in us first, then draws it out of us over time.

And as we gaze upon His face, and fall more in love with our beautiful Creator, everything else fades away. And the light of His face is so bright that we reflect His glory with unveiled faces (2 Cor 3:18), reflecting the beautifully diverse colors of His righteousness and creativity and unconditional, selfless love.

The person of Jesus is the power of His ministry. And I would contest that the only enduring mark we’ll leave on this planet is the mark we’ll leave for the Kingdom of God.

What the raindrops say about us

Because of the Raindrop Effect, I am concerned both for humankind and the human next to me, whom I may not even particularly like, but who still needs me to rise up to my calling. When Jesus commands us to love our neighbor, nobody is excluded. Of course, only God Himself can love each and every individual, and concern Himself completely with every issue in society. But I will imitate Him in His concern with as much love as had been allotted to me, because He knows when I truly am capable of something, and when I’m just making excuses.

Because of the Raindrop Effect, I can make an impact both locally and globally. I can empower the people around me also to make waves. But ultimately, no matter how strategic I am, if I’m not making an impact for God’s great cause to restore people back to Him… I am just floundering around and wasting my time.

Because of the Raindrop Effect, I know my influence ultimately finds its source not in the amount of water I have in me, but the amount of water my Cloud has. I have a God who raising up leaders around the world, who is speaking to them clearly — not with blurred waves, but intentionally maturing them until they’re ready to leave their mark, and leave it well.

How does one optimize his or her influence, then?

There is no formula.

Humankind will always have a tendency to make a religion out of everything: creating rules and 12-step programs and meditation CD’s so we can boast about how we rose to the top with nobody’s help, then looking down on everyone who didn’t fall into the same religious trap we did.

Well, this is the opposite of what Jesus did. Jesus fervently opposed this kind of religion. He opposed inequality, and people trying to build their value and power to rise above others and step on the oppressed and hurting. Instead of forcing others against their will to bow down to Him, He built His kingdom by surrendering Himself in desperation to God.

And He tells us that the best way to find victory is, in fact, to surrender our entitlement, our control, even our very rights, and to trust Him to make the most of our lives just to spite religion and self-glorifying human achievement and oppression.

I have spent much of my time lately investing into individual friends, clients, and family members, but tonight I felt led to write this post so I could reach a few more people in different ways. I hope I have catalyzed some waves of conviction in you today.

No raindrop would exist without a Cloud.

The more time it spends in the Cloud, the more waves it will make. And the closer it gets to the very heart of that Cloud, the more it will be formed and formed until it’s Ready.

And the more drops that evaporate and rise up to spend time in the Cloud, the more waves we’ll make, simply by nature of letting the Cloud shape us into the drops we were formed to be.

And that is how you make a lake dance.