{"id":5467,"date":"2026-05-28T08:03:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T12:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5467"},"modified":"2026-05-28T08:03:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T12:03:17","slug":"ripples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/28\/ripples\/","title":{"rendered":"Ripples"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

In 2009 on a rain-slick stretch of Interstate 15 in Idaho, a man by the name of Rich Retallic lost control of his light truck.

His vehicle struck the median and overturned. Even though he was wearing his seat belt, the impact tragically took Rich\u2019s life. He was a 62-year-old husband, father, and grandfather.

As I happened to mention closer to that time, he was also the youth leader whom God used to change my life.

Early in the 1970s, Rich was studying to become a pastor at Louisville Theological Seminary. He arrived at my family\u2019s church on the north side of Indianapolis as a \u201cweekend warrior\u201d contracted to spend 48 hours every week leading our garden-variety high school youth group.

I was one of the seniors. I was also on my way out. I was in the process of leaving the youth group, my church, and Christianity itself as a way of making sense of the world.

I had become captivated by Darwinism and evolutionary biology\u2019s answers to the three great human questions.

Who are we?<\/em> We are the end products of a long series of fortuitous genetic mutations.

Where are we heading?<\/em> Individually we are headed for the grave.\u00a0As a species we will all perish when total entropy transforms the universe into an everlasting icebox.

What should we be doing right now?<\/em>\u00a0I resonated with what Kurt Vonnegut had said to his young son Mark when he asked, “Dad, why are we here?”\u00a0The novelist replied, “We’re here to help each other get through this, whatever this is.”\u00a0 \u00a0

Then Rich showed up.\u00a0\u00a0

He wasn\u2019t like our previous youth group leaders, who were brimming with cutting edge ideas and led incisive discussions about Vietnam, America’s social upheaval, and whether the God-Is-Dead theologians were right.\u00a0By comparison, Rich was rather dull.\u00a0\u00a0

But Rich actually claimed to know God.\u00a0I was intrigued.\u00a0I had never known anyone personally who prayed as if God might answer.\u00a0\u00a0

Even though I was supposed to be abandoning the whole church thing, I stuck around to see if there might be some truth in the Jesus stories after all.

Rich gave me a book (Run, Baby, Run<\/em>, by Nicky Cruz) authored by a New York City gang leader and murderer who had come to Christ in the midst of a seemingly hopeless life.\u00a0It was the first time I seriously entertained the thought that God might be real and accessible. He might even be interested in a Midwestern teenager.\u00a0\u00a0

I don’t recall exactly when my heart began to change. Gradually I realized there was another set of answers to the great human questions:

Who are we?\u00a0<\/em>We are the treasured children of the magnificent Architect of the universe.

Where are we heading?<\/em> We are either running towards or scurrying away from God’s outstretched arms.\u00a0\u00a0

What should we be doing right now?<\/em>\u00a0We have the chance to bet our lives that Jesus knows the truth about everything.\u00a0\u00a0

Looking back, I would have to say that I was born again breech<\/em>.\u00a0Rich helped me through the struggle.\u00a0To this day I still wrestle with doubts and questions.\u00a0But he was the first person who showed me I could trust God and love science and not lose my mind in the process.\u00a0

Rich’s dream of becoming a pastor never came true.\u00a0He doubted his own gifts.\u00a0He moved to the Pacific Northwest and became an elementary school teacher, Phys Ed instructor, and postal worker.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

More than three decades after we went our separate ways, I gave Rich a call.\u00a0It was wonderful to hear his voice.\u00a0We talked about how our lives had turned out.\u00a0I assured him that he had been instrumental in shaping the course of everything I had experienced.

Rich resisted the idea that he had made much of a difference. He seemed surprised to learn that, incredibly, nine of the kids and volunteer leaders in that garden-variety youth group had entered full-time Christian ministry \u2013 in large part because of his own faithfulness to God.\u00a0\u00a0

What will surprise us the most in the next world?

I don’t think it will be the answers we finally receive to our most vexing theological questions.

I suspect our eyes will open widest when we grasp the impact that we had on each other’s lives.

Just by showing up day by day with our prayers, our love, that book we once gave to someone, and our brief words of encouragement, we\u2019re sending out what seem to be the humblest of ripples.

But those ripples go all the way to eternity.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here In 2009 on a rain-slick stretch of Interstate 15 in Idaho, a man by the name of Rich Retallic lost control of his light truck. His vehicle struck the median and overturned. Even though he was wearing his seat belt, the impact tragically took Rich\u2019s life. He was a 62-year-old husband,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5468,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[689,544],"class_list":["post-5467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-conversion","tag-legacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5469,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5467\/revisions\/5469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}