Think about the Butterfly

[repost from 2021]

Not long ago, I shared with college students the story of how I came to meet my wife, Patti. I decided to do that after a friend of mine encouraged me to, as a story of how divine Providence works in life. He had asked me how Patti and I first met. As I thought it through, I recalled various important moments, from the time of our first acquaintance to becoming close friends to asking her to be my girlfriend to begging her to be my wife.

This friend of mine is a great listener, and his excellent questions took me back farther and farther, all the way back to the time before Patti and I met. The journey of remembering can be fun!

We ended up all the way back in October of 1984, when I made my decision to leave my home in Massachusetts and go to Florida State University — where I would eventually meet Patti Ann Masters. He asked me, “Why Florida State?” I told him I had wanted to be a meteorologist since I was 10 years old, and that in my Junior year of high school my sister used her connections to get me a whole afternoon and evening with the chief meteorologist at WBZ TV in Boston, Bruce Schwoegler.

I was starstruck. I had for years watched him every night on the evening news, and would even record his forecasts on VHS tapes to watch them over and over, learning everything I could. He was so generous with his time and attention that day. I remember vividly discussing “mesoscale convective complexes” and the Blizzard of ’78 with him. What a thrill!

At the end of my day of shadowing, after he’d finished the 6 PM newscast, he said: “So, let’s get to the million-dollar question. Where to go to college. Florida State and UCLA are the best for this. But I would say FSU’s Meteorology department has an edge with Dr. Jim O’Brien there.” Dr. O’Brien had played a key role in the discovery of the El Nino.

And so it happened. I applied to FSU and was accepted.

At FSU I would dive deep into the fun life, and then meet Chris Wade, a fellow student, weight-lifting partner and Evangelical Christian who eventually led me to a life-altering encounter with Christ in my dorm room one evening. That evening reshaped the whole course of my life, especially by leading me back to church, and across the street to St. Thomas More Co-Cathedral where I would meet Patti after Mass one November Sunday in 1988. Those two events define everything I have become.

At this point in my retelling the story, my friend offered some perspectives I would like to share here. He said something to this effect:

Think about it! Do you think Bruce had any idea how many lives he forever changed by his off-handed comment that day? It was probably a piece of advice he’d given to dozens of other weather aspirants. And yet, imagine this: his advice that evening ultimately opened the door to your encounter with Jesus, discerning a vocation, meeting your future wife, having your children, establishing lifelong friendships, beginning a new career in the church — think of the effects. Count them and they’d be endless, right?

I know you’ve certainly heard of the Butterfly Effect. I’ve heard it’s something like the strength of a September hurricane in the Caribbean is impacted by something as minuscule as the flapping wing of a Morpho butterfly months earlier in Columbia.

We should never underestimate the effects our least significant acts of fidelity can have on the future of the world. WAY down the road. Every thought, choice, movement you make, the future is filled with new things that never had to be this way.

Because we don’t see the effects, we’re often tempted to despair and say: “What good is the little I do? No one notices. No one cares. It doesn’t really matter.” But it does matter. Everything matters. We tend to be so myopic and narrow in our judgment on the value of what we do. Undervalue what God can do with our little nothings.

Life is an ecosystem. The interdependence of everything we’re about is staggeringly complex. So intricate and delicate on a nanoscale. Just one smile, one quiet “whoosh” of a sacrifice, or one harsh word can change the course of history. For better or ill. Dostoyevsky said your interior life extends out into the whole cosmos; your most secret thoughts can make it easier or more difficult for others to follow Christ.

On Judgment Day we will see all of this through God’s eyes. An astonishingly complex web of influence we were part of. See our role in that web. Imagine seeing all that!

Maybe when we die we will hear “I was hungry and you gave me food” from people we’ve never met — who weren’t fed by us directly, but were fed by the others we impacted, who in turn fed them. Generations later in the future. Think of that next time you feel your work is insignificant. Grace makes our influence without borders.

When God chose Abram and Sarai, he said: “Go west, sweeties, look at the stars in the sky and try to count! Because ‘countless’ is the size of impact you’ll have on all of history.” They gave their yes and wowee, look at what’s happened. God told them “Go!” and they went. 1800 years later, God becomes flesh from their DNA. And 3800 years later, here we are. You. Me. Patti. Your children. All of us defined by their yes.

…Tom, what you are doing now for your children will shape your great great grandchildren.