The Longing to Make a Deep and Lasting Impact

“San Francisco artist David Best is known for building intricate monuments from delicately cut sheets of plywood. Often reaching fifty feet tall, they feature turrets, spindles and railings. These edifices are built in memory of people who have passed away. He leaves a stack of magic markers in the structures and encourages people to write messages about their deceased loved ones. The messages are a mix of profundity and pain. One message was a mix of both. Scrawled in green letters eight inches tall, it read: “Dad, what did your life mean?”

There was no story written alongside the question, so we can only imagine the circumstances driving someone to ask it. Whether the father in question was a good one or not is beside the point. The inference is this:” Dad, I watched you closely and cannot determine the impact you had. It would appear that even from a child’s point of view, your life meant…nothing.” Tragically, at the end of a parent’s life, a child looked at his life story and could not perceive an obvious long-term impact on the world, for good or bad. Asked in a moment of private vulnerability, that simple question reveals a longing that exists in every human heart. It is an attempt to reconcile the temporal nature of this life with the eternal nature of the next one. Intuitively, people desire to make an impact. Most cannot bear the thought that the extent of their existence could be summed up in a few lines chiseled on a gravestone. There must be more. Knowing we have limited time in this life, we all long to make a difference that will last far beyond our moment in time, confirming that our lives have meaning beyond the end of our days of flesh and blood. If the desire to have an impact is so much a part of the essence of what it means to have a human soul, surely that desire will not find its ultimate fulfillment in this age. It must come to fruition in the age to come. We are wired to make an impact for all eternity.

We were created to do that which is relevant and significant. God designed us to desperately want to make a difference in the lives of others. We need to know we are making a contribution that is significant to God and one He esteems and remembers forever. Being sure we are impacting people now, while at the same time achieving eternal reward in Heaven, satisfies this longing. A life of meaning involves living in a way that contributes to the enrichment of others in this life and in the age to come. Working together with Jesus to awaken other hearts in love is essential to our emotional health.

I have no greater joy than to hear that my children 2walk in truth. (3 John 4)

The longing to make a relevant impact includes the longing for the heroic. By heroic, I mean being willing to risk losing everything so others can experience something significant and life-changing. We long to share things with others that change them or bring them joy and goodness; for example, when we receive great news about something and can’t wait to tell the ones we love. When a five-year-old boy finds out his brother is getting a brand new bicycle for Christmas, he just has to tell the secret to see the brother explode with joy. We love being a part of that which exhilarates the people we love. When a woman wins the lottery, she will phone her family immediately to celebrate with them. When a terminal cancer patient receives some breakthrough medical cure, he can not contain himself from telling the other patients in the cancer ward The desire to exhilarate others with good news is fundamental to our humanity.” (Bickle, pp 133-135)

Excerpted from Mike Bickle (2006), The Seven Longings of the Human Heart: Kansas City, MO.