The ‘Influencer’ – Toni M. Babcock
If you stop by our place in the fall, you might see a curious thing in our yard — me following my husband, while I’m picking up mushrooms and throwing them in a white bucket. Why you say? Well, my husband and I don’t want smashed mushrooms stuck in the waffles of our shoes, nor do we want withering fungi turning into a slimy mush in the grass (and we get a lot of fungi).
I didn’t mention my husband has a powerful ‘influencer’ he holds in his hands — a leaf blower. While I’m picking fungi, he’s blowing leaves. I don’t yank the blower out of his hands. He’s got a plan and a purpose for those leaves, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’ll pile them over the septic area to help insulate the system during the cold winter months. Plus, as he blows leaves, he exposes the mushrooms and makes my job a whole lot easier.
God has a powerful influencer too, it’s the Holy Spirit. “The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit,” (John 3:8 CSB).
Because God knows what he’s doing, I won’t be yanking the blower out of His hands either. I won’t be telling the Spirit how to do His work, or why he needs to use me to do it, or how he should go next door and clean up somebody else’s yard. Instead, I’ll follow the Lord with my mushroom bucket – looking for all the blight and sin in my own yard that His blower might be exposing. I’ll need to bend low and dig deep to get to the bottom of things, but my environment will improve immensely and I won’t be dragging dirty fungi into the house.
Don’t you just love the way God works? He’s the best at everything He does.
Toni M. Babcock is the author of Reflections from the Heart in Light of the Gospel of Jesus. Contact 
