What’s In Your Wake?

I recently had the opportunity to spend a day on the water with some friends. We tooled around Alum Creek on their boat. We talked. We ate. We relaxed. We went tubing around the water. It was great fun. But while I was being dragged behind the boat in the tube, I began to think about the power of a wake. 

A wake is the disturbance that happens in the water behind a boat. The faster the boat goes through the water, the more disturbed the water. The more disturbed the water, the bigger the wake! While we were tooling around the water and I was in the tube, the wake got a little big. I personally think it was one of those see how fast pastor can handle it kind of things. And don’t get me wrong…it was a blast! But the faster we sped through the water, the larger the wake became. The distance between the peaks in the water and the valleys created by the boat speeding through the water grew as the throttle was increased.

While a wake is typically something that occurs naturally in water, there’s a similar phenomenon that takes place in our daily lives. We leave a wake wherever we go. It’s not always as noticeable as the wake behind a boat, but there certainly is a series of waves that follow us. Sometimes our wake is healing and encouragement, while other times our wake is filled with destruction and discouragement. How mindful are you of the wake you’re leaving?

I have to admit, sometimes I am less than careful about my wake. It’s part of my personality. I’m a person who scores pretty high as a Type A on a personality profile test. This basically means that I’m driven, focused, task oriented. I’m a get the job done kind of guy. If a task is before me, I don’t sit around and plan out all of the details. I typically jump in and get it done. As helpful as this might be, at times I move too fast through life. At times, my focus on the task at hand prevents me from seeing the people around me. And unintentionally I leave people in a devastating wake of accomplishments and check-marks on a to-do list.

As we sped through the water last week, I couldn’t help but realize the power of the wake. As my tube hopped and bumped through the water behind the boat, I realized the pain that a careless wake can create in the lives of people around me. While I’m not there yet, I have decided that perhaps I need to slow down a bit and focus more on the people around me than the to-do list in front of me. You can still be good at what you do and show care for those around you. It’s possible to be fast and effective at getting things done and still be mindful of the people around you. It just takes a little intentionality and purposeful communication.

So what’s in your wake? What kind of devastation is behind you? Perhaps a better question for us to consider is who is in your wake? What relationships have been destroyed by the waves in your wake? Who have you hurt as you sped through life in a get-r-done mentality?

Slow down. Stop and look at what’s around you. Periodically look behind you to make sure that you’re not dragging someone through your wake or worse yet, that you haven’t lost someone in the waters of life behind you. In our boat ride we had a rule – we all had to keep an eye on the person in the water. Even the driver of the boat looked back frequently to make sure he wasn’t missing something or hadn’t lost us! Glance around you today to see the wake you’re leaving. You just might see someone struggling to stay afloat.