With appreciation to the writer, I share today a message I received recently via E-mail.

When I was a boy of 11-12, you came to my town and I saw you there. We had your album and I can remember like it was yesterday playing your song, “Cold Cathedral,” over and over again! To this very day, I often sing that song to myself, word for word, as if I had just listened to it.

Now 35 years later and 3000 miles away from my boyhood town, I play in my church praise band for Sunday worship and special concerts. There are so many times when my thoughts drift back to your early influence in my life—some "foundation" you set in me—and it occurs to me that for this "boy,” you were and remain a very special person in my life. Totally unknown to you, of course, but I hope that in my music there sits a boy out there who will remember me in the same way I remember you.

That last part is the reason I share this with you, because each of us has an important giftedness in some area for the benefit of others, and we will never know the whole story of those we have touched.

It is one of our greatest hopes to have a life that somehow makes a difference in the world, and more specifically, in someone else's life. This is when we know our purpose goes beyond our own existence. Even through our mistakes and pain (and often because of these things) we have an ability to touch someone else's life marked by similar experiences. In this case, it was someone with a musical gift who got inspired simply by seeing me use mine.

There is a kind of mentoring that we do on purpose by taking someone under our wing and teaching them, whether formally or informally, through our knowledge and experience. (My wife is known for taking in “lost boys”­—friends of our son and former boyfriends of our daughter.) These are people we take time for because we know we have an opportunity in their lives.

But there are other people we may never know about. People who are watching, or people we may touch only once, but who don't forget an act of kindness or a gesture of inclusion. These are people whose lives we affect by simply being faithful to what we have been given to do. You may touch someone today in ways you will never know. That's why it's important to be faithful in using the gifts you have been given to serve others. You never know when someone's life or inspiration may depend on it.