“To be a good influencer, focus on authenticity, transparency, consistent high-quality content, active engagement with your audience, a clear niche, and a relatable personality…” – Safari search answer
While helping with a railroad station safety blitz a few months ago, I received a wrist band with the simple message “Be a Safety Influencer”. It is particularly meaningful to me because on March 2, 1994, our daughter, Lauren, died at a railroad crossing about a mile from our home. Since then, I have focused a great deal of my time trying to eliminate deaths and injuries at railroad crossings and along railways. So, how to be a good and effective “Safety Influencer” is certainly important to me. Influencers are leaders. They promote fashion, games, and new products. My hope is that we can cultivate more who care about the common good rather than personal gain. My focus is on good influencers, for the good!
Our world needs people who are helping to make our small planet a better place to live. Over 2,000 years ago, through his teachings, stories, and example, Jesus was quite the influencer! In fact, his followers today, Christians, are the largest religious group on earth, with a membership estimated to be about 2.4 billion. His authenticity, transparency, humility, courage, forgiveness, and compassion is memorialized in the best-selling book of all time, the Judeo-Christian Bible. Jesus’s clear message is simply to love God and love our neighbor. His influential personality helped him deliver that message.
Although not the founder of Hinduism, Mahatma Gandhi’s lifelong fight for India’s independence from British rule, using nonviolent resistance, inspired and united the nation of India. Talk about a good influencer! His philosophy of nonviolent resistance has influenced civil rights leaders around the world, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the movement’s most famous leaders. Dr. King went on to become one of the greatest civil rights influencers of all time thanks to Gandhi and the influence of Jesus, whose nonviolent approach was based upon love.
When I wear my “Be a Safety Influencer” wrist band, I am sometimes asked about it. The conversation often starts like this “In addition to being a safety influencer, I would like to be an influencer like Jesus, helping people to love God and to love our neighbors near and far. What kind of influencer are you?” Their answers are uplifting and reassuring, among them: for positive mental health, more patience, an end to hatred, genuine kindness, greater empathy, more participation in art and theater, having a positive attitude, tolerance of children with disabilities, and health of the environment. We are surrounded by kind and caring people who, if inspired, could assert their influence. If each of us could find a way to be a good influencer for the good of all, we could help bring God’s kingdom to earth as it is in heaven. In doing so, we could bring peace on earth and heal the planet. No one can do this alone; but together, we can be powerfully good influencers for God’s world. Let’s do it!
In God’s Love,
Lanny F. Wilson, MD
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. – Matthew 22:37b-39
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