The Good & Quiet Ripple

Mike recounts a Bible passage in which Peter's shadow serves to heal the sick, emphasizing that Peter was merely a vessel for God's power - unaware of the miracles occurring around him.

In an age driven by boastfully sharing our narratives, even good deeds and extemporaneous acts of kindness can often feel transactional. There is a magic that occurs when good deeds are done for their own sake, which produce secondary, tertiary, and unforeseen reverberations of wholesome goodwill.

There’s a Bible verse within the book of Acts in which Peter, the religious leader of the community, walks down the street and heals the sick and ailing townspeople around him.

But what the pastor really emphasized was that the shadow of Peter had served to heal these people. It wasn’t that Peter himself was intentionally healing these people; but rather, he served as a vessel to God’s power, passively carrying through him God’s power upon the earth to heal all these people.

And the really distinct thing is that Peter had no idea - this was a phenomenon that was going on unbeknownst to Peter himself when he was walking through the street and when people were leaving out their sick and suffering relatives to get healed by Peter.

What struck me about this passage was that the power of God was acting through Peter, without Peter himself even knowing, and most importantly, without Peter even receiving any acknowledgement that it was happening at all.

In this age of social media, we live in this sort of world in which, when somebody does something good, they expect some sort of reward for it. Even the general concept of karma implies that, for every good thing I do, I’m entitled to some good thing back. And that’s not something that should be shunned or discredited; in fact it’s valid to want to be rewarded for doing good work.

But the idea of doing good for goodness sake is what really stuck out to me. And the idea that we shouldn’t help other people, just for the reward of it - that we ought to help others simply for the good of its own sake.

We live in this world in which everything is so transactional - where we’ve come to expect that, if we give a dollar to a homeless person, the universe therefore ‘owes’ us a dollar back in some immediate to medium-term future.

I don’t want to dismiss this as a selfish thing, but it’s something that is a little reductionist in realizing the good in others. It takes away the magic from helping others. And it discredits the Lord, because we’re making it about us - and not the power of the Lord, and about the innate joy of helping somebody else - and seeing them prosper - even if it doesn’t immediately affect us, and even if their prosperity doesn’t bring us prosperity - or even some dividend thereof.

But you know what? Though it might disappoint some people to know that you’re not going to receive that immediate reward… the bigger thing I really loved about that notion is this - that there are impacts and secondary impacts, and tertiary impacts - and derivative effects of these good deeds that we don’t even know about.