The Butterfly Effect by Georgie Tennant

According to the infallible authority that is Wikipedia, “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in a large differences in a later state.” Clear as mud?  I’m with you on that one.

Even if the obscure wording of Wikipedia doesn’t enlighten us much, I think most people are familiar with the concept of ‘The Butterfly Effect,’ - the idea that a small, seemingly insignificant event can cause ripples and effects we could hardly begin to imagine.

Ray Bradbury’s chilling short story, ‘A Sound of Thunder,’ approaches this concept from a more sinister angle.  It is 2055 and a time travelling company runs a commercial operation, taking groups of people back to the time of the dinosaurs to hunt them.  The three men who take the trip in the story are warned to shoot only marked dinosaurs and to stay on the path provided.  Failing to follow both these rules could change the past and have a detrimental effect on the future. In a flurry of panic when a T-Rex appears, one of the men steps off the path, noticing too late that he has crushed a butterfly.  When the men return to 2055, everything is recognisable but darker and more sinister – including the election to president of an evil, dictatorial politician, instead of the moderate candidate in place when they left.

I think of the ‘Butterfly Effect’ often in relation to my own life as a Christian.  On the night I decided to go along to a new youth club in our village, aged 12, I almost didn’t.  It was a hot evening and I was enjoying wallowing on a lilo in the paddling pool in our garden.  Making the decision to go started me on a journey towards a faith I can’t imagine being without.  How vast and far reaching the ripples from that momentary decision.

The links to our writing lives are obvious.  Dwelling on them with a bit of imagination can be inspiring and motivating.  What if one of my poems about grief helps someone to feel they are not alone on a difficult day and helps them get through? What if others reading my blog choose to talk to someone, instead of suffering in silence?  What if someone reading, say Jane Clamp’s ‘Too Soon,’ devotional finds themselves able to support a friend going through baby loss instead of having no idea how to? What if, as another example, Lucy Rycroft’s new Advent devotional is read by someone struggling and overwhelmed in a tricky season and it helps them focus back on the peace of Christ, even for a few minutes and their new-found peace is caught and experienced by others?  I could carry on with many, many other examples – insert your own writing titles and potential effects here and I hope you get the (slightly laboured!) idea.

A friend asked me, recently, if she could use some of my writing at a sibling bereavement weekend run by ‘Care for the Family.’  She shared my ‘Sonnet About Grief,’ and I am praying that it will help even one person to get through the valleys of their grief – and maybe countless others if it takes off and flies as far as I pray it will.  If it does, what a privilege.

Let’s re-imagine our words, today, as butterflies, flapping their wings as we release them into God’s world.  Let’s pray for them to land well, in the right places, at the right moments, causing ripples that will have an impact into eternity.  Maybe only there will we truly see the incredible scale of the ‘Butterfly Effect’ of our humble words released into the service of our King.

Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive.  She is married, with two sons, aged 11 and 8 who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW ‘Christian Writer’ magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published ‘New Life: Reflections for Lent,’ and ‘Merry Christmas, Everyone: A festive feast of stories, poems and reflections.’ She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog: www.somepoemsbygeorgie.blogspot.co.uk