Intentional Influence

                          I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.  Psalm 32:8

I write notes to myself all the time. Often it is just some ditty I heard that struck me at the time and so I write it down for when I might need it. The problem is that I have no system for keeping them. In my search for a name and telephone number – also scratched onto some piece of paper after church one day – I found a little note on my desk: “Influence by accident or influence by effort.”

 

For the last several weeks I have been praying about, thinking about, studying about, and writing about mentoring I don’t know where I found this saying but I never used it in my writing or teaching before today.  A retreat I recently taught was called “Intentional Friendships” and was largely based on Titus 2:3-5. Most of us know these verses very well. “Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”  Very few of us know Titus 2:7-8  Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.

Taken as a whole passage these verses teach the little ditty, don’t they?  “Influence by accident or influence by effort.”  It seems to me that in all we do, we are doing one or we are doing the other.

A woman told me some time ago that she had been watching something I did to see how I did it so she could shoot for the same results. I was immediately embarrassed, wondering what she had observed in the times she had watched me, wondering if I was consistent and what attitude she had seen. Turned out that this particular outcome was positive.  Whew! 

It is a scary thought to realize that we are influencing other people even when we are not consciously trying to. The Titus 2 woman will teach intentionally but Paul is clear in his writing that we are to be as much about the example as we are the deliberate teaching. 

Verses 7 and 8 really struck me as I was studying. “Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works.” Being a role model is often unintentional – that’s kind of the definition. By virtue of the way we speak, live, and react, we will model for others our own interpretation of the Biblical woman. The Christian woman is being a role model for many – her children, her children’s friends, her co-workers, her peers at church, her peers wherever she goes. If we are not aware of this we need to be. Our witness for Jesus goes with us wherever we go.

Among the places we go and the people we talk to, are others aware we are Christians?  Does our language line up with our profession of faith? What about our attitudes – are we constant complainers or whiners or worriers? How is Christ honored in what others see and hear?

As I mentioned, teaching will be either intentional or unintentional.  We must do it with “integrity, dignity, and sound speech.” When we are deliberately playing the role of teacher it requires prayer, study, and input from others. We usually don’t prepare to teach based on what we think without checking the Bible and other sound sources (at least we should not be teaching unprepared!).  

There are lots of deliberate teaching roles – especially if you are “older” like I am! It may be a time of one to one mentoring with a younger woman hungry for spiritual truth. It may be a more formal Sunday School class or Youth group teaching. Whatever it is, are we winging it with the teaching or are we preparing a lesson after praying and knowing what the Lord wants us to teach? We can only lead others as far as we have gone (another little ditty I wrote down somewhere along the way!). 

The truth is that if we interact with the world or the church in any way we are setting some sort of example – all the time. We will influence others for good or for evil. In order to be consistently doing it for good – we will have to put effort into it. 

We do influence by accident when we are not trying to influence by effort.