Tom Towns

GUEST COLUMNIST

Sometimes it's not power or powerful human emotion that changes our lives. Most of the time it's weak and rather insignificant feelings that change our lives and also change our world.

For example, what annoys motivates.

Twice in Luke's Book of Acts, people take action after becoming annoyed.

In Acts 4:1, temple priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees take action, arresting Peter after he annoyed them by having the audacity to preach about Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and actually healing someone right there in Solomon's Portico. What cheek. What chutzpah. That would annoy just about anyone, wouldn't it?

Then, in Acts 16:18, Paul took action, exorcising a slave girl, who was possessed with a spirit of divination, but who also made her owners lots of money by fortune-telling. Her owners did not have a problem with her being possessed because together they made money. Paul had the problem with her, because she would cry out every day, "These men (Paul and Silas) are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." While we would consider her cries free advertising these days, Paul found it annoying. He wanted her to stop crying out. So he ordered the spirit to leave her, and it did, angering her owners a great deal, because their source of revenue departed when the spirit departed. Her owners tried Paul in court and had him thrown into prison right after they had him beaten. Because Paul was a bit annoyed, his life changed.

What annoys motivates. What annoys triggers lawsuits and court hearings. What annoys motivates people to thrash other people. It's actually amazing to ponder what this seemingly mild and rather puny feeling can do to people -- prison, court hearings, beatings and more.

Yes, it's amazing, but there is a lesson here in these two passages. Not only what is powerful results in long-lasting, life-changing consequences, but rather scrawny feelings can trigger life-changing results, too.

I heard the story about a young man who annoyed the driver of a rather large and powerful truck one day. The truck driver was annoyed and honked his horn repeatedly, because this young man was driving too slowly. The young man ignored the honking horn and just kept driving slowly, annoying the truck driver. The next thing the young man knew was he was looking down the barrel of a pistol being pointed at him from the driver of the same rather large and powerful truck, passing him on the left side of the road. People's lives could have been changed in an earsplitting and sorrowful split second, just because of a little feeling called "annoyance."

We often ignore or minimize how our little feelings affect our lives and the lives of those around us. Yet, more often than not, it can be the feeble feeling, the short-lived off-the-cuff rude comment, the brief fit of temper, or a mild sense of apathy that changes how we feel about someone or changes how they feel about us. It might be diluted feelings like these that change the world before the more powerful and recognizable feelings. Put another way, I suggest that the ordinary and the common change our lives before the extraordinary and the rare. And so, people just like you and me -- not the heroes or heroines, not the one-in-a-million, and not the extraordinary and famous -- bring peace to a peaceless world, bring justice to an unjust world, or bring resurrection to a world full of death without having to wait for only the exceptionally powerful.

We can stop minimizing the power of our ordinary and common feelings, acting as if only "the great ones of history" can change the world. People like us have already spent centuries changing the world, and we will continue to change the world. How have ordinary people like us changed the world?

Every feeling is like a wave of water. Most feelings are small waves and almost imperceptible. They occur without us taking much notice, like the feeling of boredom, irritation, unpleasantness, mild interest, and so on. On occasion we experience powerful feelings, and these are big waves, like tidal waves. They come suddenly and all at once, and for a brief period they change us and what's around us, like the tsunamis changed the southeast Asian coastline and people's lives. But, such power wells up and explodes and then is finished, while small waves -- small, insignificant feelings -- keep coming and coming. And those waves changed the southeast Asian coastline much, much more over the centuries than the occasional tidal wave.

Our lives and our small, almost unnoticeable feelings are the same as these repetitive waves, slowly, but consistently changing the world around us. Like the bland annoyance of the temple priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees changed Peter's life. Paul's moderate annoyance changed a lot of lives -- a little wave rising slightly and then falling back and lightly striking the lives of many people and changing them.

So every single on of our feelings -- big, but especially small -- change lives. They change our life, and they change the lives of all the people around us. They change the lives of people we meet for only a brief second, like the clerk in the grocery store or the mail carrier. You and I have the power to change the world without having to be forceful, intense, or loud and overpowering. We can change it being meek and mild. We can change the world by using the weakest and most insignificant feelings that occur over and over. If we find ways to teach ourselves how to like people a little and even like the world -- maybe even to like them a lot from time to time -- smiling as we walk down the street without any thought as to how to change the world, we change the world.

Knowing this is what gives me hope; knowing that by even the most insignificant feeling of happiness or pleasantness flowing through me over and over and over, I can change this world of peacelessness into a paradise -- an oasis from the intense, high-anxiety desert of life as we know it today.