When Least Expected™

What Is The Domino Effect?

March 11th, 2007 at 11:58pm Manchild

Here’s a brief quote from Chapter One of WHEN LEAST EXPECTED™ for you to think about after you leave here today. The father, Jonathan, is talking to his twin sons after the “invisible fist” strikes and sets a series of metaphorical dominoes in motion. Now that the collateral damage is done, their mentor shares some insightful words that challenges these emerging men to trust God as they birth another big dream to replace the one they lost. Before Jonathan closes their conversation, he says,

“Sons, your tomorrows will depend on what you choose to do with your todays. Only God knows how your futures will react to the impact of yesterday’s choices. So choose wisely.”

Watching news footage of the mugger who robbed the 101 year old woman outraged me. I hope they catch him so that he can get what he deserves. I’ve lived long enough to know that great people can make wise choices and still become subjected to the collateral damage of another person’s bad choices. When the dominoes start falling that our unwise decisions set in motion, these metaphorical antagonists don’t care how many actually innocent people their invisible fists hit. The “domino effect” refers to the collateral damage that happens after a great person makes a bad decision.

Have you ever been done dirty or robbed when the money your assailant took without asking was earmarked to pay your rent or house note? Have you ever been falsely arrested for a crime you didn’t commit and spent time in a jail cell instead of a college classroom? Before another person’s unwise choices adversely impacted my life, I often wondered why so many bad things kept happening to great people who had disciplined themselves to develop the good habit of making wise choices. When great people make bad choices, it indirectly affects the rest of our blended, extended family members in ways we may never know about. There’s no such thing as a “victimless” crime.

As you know, crime is once again on the rise. Why? Is it due to poverty, poor leadership, or our generation’s inability to trust God absent any reservations? Do desperate people, who do desperate things, do so because they still don’t honestly believe that nothing is impossible to God? What happened in your life when you lacked the faith to let our Father accept full responsibility for the consequences of our obedience? Did you make wise or unwise choices? In retrospect, why do we make the choices we made after Adversity decided to strike unexpectedly?

Crime is not always committed by the poor. Poverty alone doesn’t persuade poor people to commit crimes. One’s lack of patience and failure to trust that God will find a way to make a way out of no way, to turn the tables on our antagonists, to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones, to turn lemons into lemonade. What does it mean to keep turning the tables? How does one turn “stumbling blocks” into “stepping stones” during such a season as this? How does one turn lemons into lemonade?

What happens when God makes a way out of no way for you but you were there to walk through the door or window that didn’t exist until God created it just for you? How many times have we missed our blessings because we doubted God, got anxious, became impatient, or listened to the skeptics, cynics, and pundits? What did you do after the collateral damage the domino effect symbolizes adversely impacted your God-given ability to make big dreams come true and achieve great things? Now that violent crime is on the rise again, where do we go from here? Any suggestions?

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