Who influenced the stage of your life you’re living now?

Amazingly, quite a few people in my life (my husband, my family, a handful of dear friends) have been around a good long while, and it always make sense to credit them for the enduring good they have brought and continue to bring to my world.

That’s a gift like no other.

But whenever I strike out to write an acknowledgements page for a book, I try to get even more specific. To review my personal history with the project at hand and think back to who influenced me at the time I developed an interest in the subject matter contained in the book.

At the time I first engaged the ideas behind Portable Faith, which comes out Monday, I was 20 years old and living in a homeless shelter in southside Chicago (as a student) and interning at CCDA headquarters in Lawndale. It was in this stage, which was made possible by my urban studies advisor Paul Nemecek, that I met many of the people listed above–Oreon Trickey, Rick Lee, Sean Young, Wayne Gordon, John Perkins (the one affiliated with the CCDA), David Claerbaut and Ray Bakke.

And it was directly after that, I enrolled in a few masters-level classes taught by the brilliant Jim Henry, an accomplished social work professor and sociologist in West Michigan, and that I begged my way into a full-time job aimed at helping my large well-resourced, upper-educated congregation intentionally build relationships with the people on our church and city’s margins. (Our city was a blue-collar industrial town that had supported Detroit in its glory days, and also conveniently, housed the largest state prison in the country.)

It was a messy stage of life on most fronts, with me–an early twenty-something–being vested with just enough information and boldness to dangerously believe the world and global church could be changed.  And to lack a whole lot of tolerance or grace for those who didn’t necessarily buy what I was aiming for.

A lot of people tried hard for me then though. That string of people mentioned–Ron, Scott, Norma, Amy, Taryn, Cammie, Ed, Kat, and Dave? They invested hours upon hours listening and pushing back as I slowly stumbled into more maturity and gradually grew in my ability to articulate what was stirring inside me: why engaging society’s marginalized was not a political issue for a small group of urban radicals or social activists, but a spiritual issue for anyone who claimed to take the Great Commission seriously.

It was in this stage that I resolved that a group of people could not engage the work of the church, or travel “the road to the Great Commission” as evangelicals might say, without their paths leading straight through people unlike themselves.

And that seed of awareness could arguably be linked to everything I have learned and written about since, particularly this blog which is about finding extraordinary, even familial relationships in places we never expected.

Even though some of these people no longer share my day to day life, as these ideas and exercises I formulated more than ten years ago find their way onto the shelves, I can’t thank them enough for their imprint on my life many years ago.

What about you? Who influenced the stage of life you’re in right now? Who had a hand in the ideas that move you today? Feel free to pay tribute to them in the comments of this post.