You are making an impact at every moment

Do you ever wonder if you matter?  If your life has significance or impact?

It’s a place that I have been a few times in my life, but there is one story that comes to mind whenever I start to question my impact.

I sat there on my living room floor sobbing, drowning in a mountain of tissues.  My world was falling apart and I felt so ashamed that I wanted to just sink into the floor and disappear.   My marriage was ending and I didn’t know how to deal with it.  I recently discovered that my husband had an affair and got someone else pregnant.

This would be a heartbreaking situation for anyone, but what made this harder for me, is that I came from my abusive background.  My mother telling me I was worthless and unwanted at every opportunity possible.   Meeting my husband and getting married had been my way of affirming my worth.

I felt so broken.  If my mother didn’t love me and accept me and now I also wasn’t enough for my husband, what did that mean about me?  Did I even have value?  Was my existence even worthwhile?

I sat there contemplating the worst thoughts imaginable.  I wanted so badly to just matter.  And of course I did, to many people, but when we are stuck in those places it’s hard to believe that.  At that moment all I could see was that the people that I was supposed to matter the most to at two different stages of my life, I didn’t matter to and I was telling myself that meant I didn’t matter at all.

I cried and prayed and cried some more.  All I wanted was some sort of sign to let me know that I mattered.

And then at some point during my sobbing I suddenly felt the urge to go to my computer and I did.  I saw that I had a message request on facebook and it was from a girl I had gone to night school with in high school.

See, I was a super nerd and did extra school, night school for fun.  Night school is an interesting mix of people, a few nerds who were there for extra credit and a lot of people who had failed and a quite a few that were older and downright scary!  None of my usual friends were crazy enough to take night school, so I knew when I arrived that I needed to find my fellow nerds if I was going to survive.   And I did just that, I had a small group of friends that were just my night school friends.  We would sit together, do any group assignments together and occasionally go for a coffee before or after school.  People that I enjoyed, but no one that I ever became especially close to or kept in touch with afterwards.  

Needless to say, it was quite the surprise to be getting a message from one of those friends now.  That time felt insignificant in my life and I barely remembered it.

When I opened that message though, my heart burst open.  I couldn’t believe what I was reading.  It was the sweetest and most heartfelt message I had ever received.  This incredible girl, who had been one of my night school friends, had reached out to me and written to me all about the impact I had made in her life.   She told me about how she had been really struggling and going through a terrible time when we met.  She had felt alone and isolated and contemplated the worst things imaginable.  But meeting me at night school and our friendly conversation had been that little bit of kindness she needed in her life, to start to see her value and to feel like she mattered.  She wrote how the experience had been a turning point for the positive in her life and she told me that she felt compelled to reach out and thank me, because she didn’t know if she would be here today had it not been for that time.

I was utterly gobsmacked.  For me night school had been a passing moment in my life that I barely thought about.  And somehow right there in that moment where I was sitting wondering if I had value or I even mattered, I received this beautiful gift.   More tears flowed, but this time they were happy.

How incredible beautiful that I had unknowingly been a gift to this wonderful person when she needed it most and how she had then turned around and unknowingly been that gift to me.

Don’t ever for one moment think you don’t matter or you are not making an impact.  You are.  Just by being here and being yourself.  Your smile, your words, your presence has impacted and touched more lives than you will ever realize.  So keep on keeping on and don’t underestimate those small moments, those small gestures.   Sometimes that is all you need to do to change someone’s world.