Who Influences You Part 3: #5 – #1

This is part 3 of a 3 part series of posts. You can read the past posts by clicking on part 1 or part 2 – enjoy! Nate

Who influences you? Who shapes your life? We don’t live in a bubble. We don’t live alone. Even hermits have influencers…why do you think they cloistered themselves away???

Every day we rub shoulders with people who push and prod us in different directions. People speak into our lives, and leave indelible marks.  No matter what age we are.  As of this writing, I am 36 years old.  I’m not too young, and I’m not too old. I am right where I am supposed to be. Messiah Village is 115 years old. In the span of its lifetime, the Village has had lots of influencers.  The most recent issue of Echoes celebrated that.

It got me thinking, “who are my influencers?” I am not going to make a list of 36 people, but I am going to share with you # 5 – #1.

5. Ken Danielson – If I never remember anything I ever learned in my time at Messiah College, I’ll remember this from Ken Danielson: “Meanings are not in words, meanings are in people.”  I heard this said in multiple classes I took that were taught by Ken (I also heard “class participation is 20% of your final grade” quite often). This was an idea that really took hold of me and I had to wrestle with. In my younger years, I’d spout this line out like it was a band-aid that I could put on a conversation that I had with people…the band-aid part being that I injured them with my words and thought that they should not be offended because they took it the wrong way.

It took me many years of thinking about what the coolest professor in the Communications Dept. had said, for me to understand, that it is not necessarily MY MEANINGS that were important, but rather OTHERS MEANINGS were important, and that I should try to understand them.  I wish that I could say that I am consistent with this “understanding” especially knowing my own tendency towards dramatic turns of phrase with people.  So I have tried to take the lesson that Dr. Ken Danielson tried to beat into a room full of self-involved college students: that words on a page or spoken aloud have definitions, but what those words mean take root in our own flesh. The trick is trying to figure them out and understand them.  Thanks Ken, for still helping me participate.

4. Cynthia Shields – I’ll admit I feel conflicted. Not about having my mom on the list, but that she is occupying the #4 slot (if I was a rapper, I’d have to make Momma # 1…it’s a rule). I am guessing that people might think that she should be higher on the list due to the fact that she birthed me, took care of me, fed me, clothed me, helped me with my homework, listened to all my problems and crisis’s.

Her presence alone was and is a major influence on me, and who I have become.  But it is more than just a laundry list of things she has done (and trust me she did the laundry too), but how her life serves as a role model as for me as how to live and interact.

She encouraged my creativity and finding outlets for it.  I can say that my love of (just about) all things musical came from my mom filling the house with song. Records, tapes, piano lessons, concerts, musicals are things she exposed me to that have left an indelible mark on my life.  I don’t consider myself talented in the musical arts, but I do retreat there to get myself together. So thanks to mom, for opening up a world for me to explore and get saturated in.  But my mom did not do all this by herself…she had help from…

3. James Shields – …My dad.  Relationships between a father and a son are so very different than that between mother and son.  Sons watch their fathers as a cast mold with which to carve out their own path.  I watched my dad. So much of who I am is built around how my dad is built.

He knows how to listen to people. He knows how to tell a story. He knows how to love my mom and my sister. He knows how to pray for people, and minister to their needs. He knows how to give a hug. I have watched him for 36 years.  I hope that all that watching has helped me emulate those things in my own life.  I like to think that I am a good listener, as much as I like to talk and tell an entertaining story.

My dad as a pastor as well as a police officer had the opportunity to help people on the margins. I don’t know how much of that has informed my desire to be a person who includes others rather than keeping people out.  As much as I know it isn’t always well received and can be socially awkward, I am a hugger. I get that honestly and unabashedly from my dad. You can never truly be welcoming to the stranger if you never open up your arms.  Thank you, dad, for always having your arms open to me.

2. “Baby Boy” Shields – If you thought that you might learn the name of my currently unborn son here…sorry, you’ll have to wait (honestly, my wife have not yet made a decision on that). I never quite contemplated how much of a shift my life would have just in preparation for the arrival of my son.  I recognize that no amount of prep that I will do, will ACTUALLY prepare me for when I hold him in my own hands.

Classes and books, and web articles and blogs, and advice given by anyone and everyone will pale to that very real experience of being responsible for a new life that is part me and part my wife.  When I sit and contemplate that, it is completely overwhelming. What will I do? Will I be able to love him like my parents loved me?

Will I be able to hold his hand and let him go at the same time?  I really don’t know. I hope that I will be able to do all the things that he needs from me. I guess in time, I’ll find out.

1.Linda Shields -  WARNING: This might start to read a bit sickeningly sweet and/or clichéd, proceed at your own risk!

When I started this blog series a couple of months back, I created a list of people that had real influence over my life, and without a doubt, my wife Linda is at the top of the list.   I guess this could be considered a cheat, since she is my wife, but she hasn’t always been my wife.

Although we graduated from Messiah College in the same class year (1997), we didn’t really know each other. It was not until 2002 that we started getting to know each other. All I knew was that she was an Electrical Engineer with Tyco Electronics, which meant that she could do math and thus was much smarter that I was. So I had to work hard at being smart too, no easy task for me…

The Peacemaker and The Pot-Stirrer. That is how you could refer to us.  Linda is the peacemaker against my pot-stirring tendencies. I don’t want anyone to walk away with the impression that she follows after me to apologise to people for me. Certainly not! No, I was informed that she would take no responsibility for anything I said or did. Period.

What I mean by peacemaker, is that when I get my drama on and start wanting to needle, poke, shake a stick at or get all high and mighty about (insert topic here), Linda has been, and is, great about helping me pull back on the reigns and consider what the consequences are of those actions. That alone has helped me keep my foot out of my mouth and off of others toes on more than one occasion. She asks me good challenging questions as to my motive, and desired outcome. She has nudged me to hit my 7-second delay button more frequently.

I love my wife, and I know she loves me too. Living my life with Linda has compelled me to try to be a better man. I want her to be proud of me, to continue to love me in spite of all my failings, and to hold my hand until I loose this mortal coil.

We have had some adventures, and some up and downs. But we keep moving in the same direction. We now have a new adventure that will be with us for the rest of our lives in parenting a son.  I look forward to seeing my wife as mother to our son, and how that will change how she influences me.

So there it is, for better or worse, this wraps current list of 15. As I think back, there are many more names. And if you ask me 10 years from now, the list might look a bit different.

So again, who influences you?