Have you ever gone to Starbucks (don’t lie I know you love their coffee) and you order your usual, in my case, a caramel latte with an extra shot of espresso, and after waiting a few minutes you hear them call your name. BRENNA! Normally they call me Brianna or Brenda but that’s not the point. You look down at the cup to make sure it is yours, so you look at the name that is written on the side. It says your name and it also has a smiley face or maybe a little heart next to it. This little thing makes you feel good and your mood changes a little bit.
Something so small that maybe came so easily to your barista is almost foreign. People aren’t normally that nice or that thoughtful when it comes to complete strangers. This one act of kindness brightened your rushed, stress-filled morning. It made you slow down a little to stop and smell the roses. You smile as you walk out the front doors and instead of opening the door and pushing your way past the man trying to come in to order his morning large black coffee, you hold the door open for him and smile. That small gesture inspires him to hold the door open for people everywhere he goes that day.
I could go on all day, maybe even weeks, explaining the chain reaction that the smiley face on the side of your coffee had on all the people around you in that short 24-hour time frame. People impact other people every single day. You may not even notice that you did something that changed the entire mood of the day for a person. Sometimes you go out of your way to make someone’s day a little better, like walking past a homeless person and going into the closest restaurant to buy him or her a meal. Sometimes you do things for people you have never met before and may never see again but other times it is for your closest friends. Don’t underestimate any of it big or small.
Jesus lived a life of changing the lives of the people around him in big and small ways. He didn’t need to know them and in fact he didn’t know most of them till he approached them. Once he showed them God, their lives were changed forever, and they went and shared that feeling of love, joy, and safety with the people in their life and those people did the same thing. Do you see the chain reaction?
In Luke 19:1-10 Jesus changes the life of Zacchaeus. As Jesus is walking down the streets of Jericho, he yells out to Zacchaeus telling him that he is to stay at his house. The people of the town couldn’t believe that Jesus would stay with a sinner like Zacchaeus (Luke 19:7). This small act of staying at someone’s house changed the life of Zacchaeus and made the people pf the town think differently. Zacchaeus now can share the joy that he felt with the people all around him.
We do things and we don’t even think about the effect that those things have on the people around us. For eleven days I woke up and walked to a coffee shop on a corner street in Melipilla, Chile just because I liked the coffee. Every morning when I ordered I was welcomed with a big smile and a “how are you, what would you like today?” This smile warmed my heart and made me look forward to going back every single morning. There were days that I stayed in the coffee shop for hours drinking great coffee, eating cakes that were out of this world, and have amazing conversations with a woman that made me feel loved and welcomed. After spending ten days learning about her and her family, my team and I were asked if we would join her for some food our last night in the town. During our time in Melipilla, I didn’t think we did much or really impacted the people. But I found something out that night that changed my entire mindset. The beautiful owner of the coffee shop had been hurting and didn’t feel happy in her own shop. Yet every time we came in it changed the atmosphere of the small corner coffee shop. Us sitting and drinking coffee whether it was an hour or five it made her happy and feel safe. God can also put things on your heart that may seem unimportant but may mean the world to the people around you. One morning while walking to the coffee shop I stopped and was filled with a want to buy flowers. I picked up five beautiful orange roses and gave them to the owner of the coffee shop. Days later I found out that the day I brought her flowers was the anniversary of her grandmothers’ death. This was a woman that influenced her life in big ways and loved her with everything she had. Without me even knowing, God used me to remind someone of the love that God has for her and the love that her grandmother has for her. This brought so much peace into her life and I didn’t even know it. I had no idea my presence somewhere could do so much. God fills a room and He filled that coffee shop with so much peace, love, and joy. All the things that were needed. 
