“But I know him because I come from him, and he sent me to you.”

A few months ago Hewlett-Packard was taking out full page ads in the New York Times that said this on the top, “NFV.  Three letters. One Partner.”  It went on to read, “If you know what these three letters mean, you’re probably looking for a partner to help you get there.”  After seeing this ad a few times I finally looked up what NFV means and found this in Wikipedia: “Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that proposes using IT virtualization related technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may be connected, or chained, to create communication services.”  I guess  is it virtualization in the cloud.  But,
I then thought that either this was really smart targeted impact advertising because so many people who read the New York Times Business Section are in charge of their NFV process and products, or this was an advertising team who was just talking to themselves and it was a waste of money. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect the latter.  The lesson is to know who we are talking to, when, and where, if we want to have a targeted impact.  Scatter-shots are expensive and we end up scratching our heads wondering if we have made an impact or not.

As we strive to have an impact on others to expand God’s Kingdom, we should also strive to be as close to knowing others as we can so that we can best reach them and they best see Christ reflected through our lives into theirs.  Jesus said that He knew God because He came from God and was sent to each of us.  We can and always want to be led from the place of following what God wants to do within our lives and allowing ourselves to be ready to impact others around us. There will always be the person on the corner who shouts out about Jesus to those he/she doesn’t know, but the real impact comes from those that others do know and look towards to see who this Jesus is all about.  That is where the real impact occurs.

Reference:  John 7:29 (new Living Translation)