In everyone’s life there is a person or few, with whom we make a connection along our pathway through life toward our destiny. It is difficult to describe these people as a unit with precisely the same characteristics because they are not the same, but similar. Moreover, we are not the same person when we meet these people; like a river flowing with watery contents ever changing is not the same again. Time marks events, but change is the irresistible power that is poorly described by times passage. However, the similarity of our meeting, connection, and separation from these people is so distinct that it can catch our attention in a way we never forget. 

These “Influences”, (a better depiction than people or even individuals) are full of experience and insight, the kind we so desperately need at this particular place in time. We connect like a paper towel absorbing spilled liquid. Then just as quick, the towel is saturated and the influence is gone. The person still lives and moves, perhaps even in our same sphere, but never reconnecting, and in that way they are gone forever. Yet, the influence has now become an impartation, like the tiny pollen particle which finds its way into the flowers pistil, and something much greater begins to grow. 

If you have lived very long at all, you have at least tasted what I’ve described, but if you’re older you may have memories which become myths through repeated recall and myths that are now legends in your mind of these phantoms who blew in upon the wind and sailed away among the clouds. Within questions remain as to why there was not more; how things could have been different, or what does it all mean? Things, events and people are not in our control, even our paths are set out before us by the Sovereign God Almighty. You might have heard about it when they moved, retired, died or they may have seemingly disappeared. When we think of them as people they are small and temporal like everyone, and we had only a brief passing during a long journey. Still, the impartation lives and grows – which is the evidence and substance of the friend removed.