You Never Know Your Impact: She Found the Right Mike Davis

I wrote about it a few weeks ago. A woman I’d never met, Mable Ruth Combs, sent me a message asking if I was a Mike Davis from Dayton — a car lot owner, a pastor, a man who took a young boy named Chris Lane under his wing more than twenty years ago and brought him to church.

I wasn’t him. I told her that. I wished her luck. You never know your impact when you turn someone away thinking you’re not the person they’re looking for.

Then I sat with it for a while, because being mistaken for someone else’s mentor made me think about all the moments I don’t remember having — the ones that might still be sitting in somebody else’s life, doing more work than I ever knew.

I didn’t expect an update. I definitely didn’t expect this one.

She Kept Looking

Mable didn’t stop after our conversation. She reached out to more people, ran down more names, and eventually connected with Pastor Tommy Beeker and his wife, old friends of hers. Tommy knew a Pastor Mark from Agape Harvest Church. And Pastor Mark knew the real Mike Davis, because the two of them had gone through the Promise Keepers program together, years ago, in different towns.

But that’s how you find someone after twenty years. Not through search engines. Through people who stayed connected to people who stayed connected to people.

He’s living in Florida now.

He Remembered

Mable told me the real Mike Davis remembered Chris “very well.” Not vaguely. Not “the name sounds familiar.” Well.

She told me something else too — Chris doesn’t remember much from his childhood. Most of it is just gone. But he remembers everything about Mike Davis mentoring him.

Twenty-some years, a car lot on Airway Rd, a boy he brought to church on Sunday mornings — and somewhere in Florida, none of it had faded. He was, in Mable’s words, “a little shocked” that someone had written about it at all.

Maybe what felt ordinary to him had never felt ordinary to Chris.

That’s the part that gets me. Because he didn’t do it to be remembered. He just did it.

And it was still there, twenty years later, waiting to be found by two strangers and a blog post. You never know your impact until it shows up on someone else’s doorstep, twenty years later.

You Never Know Your Impact on the People Around You

Here’s what I didn’t expect: the search itself did something to the people doing the searching.

Mable told me she doesn’t currently go to church. She grew up in one, still prays, still reads her Bible, but hasn’t found a place she likes in a while. And Chris — the boy who’s now 43 — hadn’t been in a church for some time either.

This past Sunday, they went.

Together.

So Mable said it plainly:

“I got Chris to go with me. It’s been quite some time since I’ve gotten him into church. I don’t go religiously either myself, and I should.”

I have a hard time believing that’s just coincidence.

I think that’s what happens when you go looking for someone who showed you what following God actually looks like — you end up walking back toward it yourself, even if that wasn’t the plan. That’s the strange thing about impact — you never know where it’s going to land next.

You Never Know Your Impact Until Someone Comes Looking

I said this in the first post, and I still believe it: you don’t get to choose which moment becomes the one somebody spends twenty years remembering.

What I didn’t expect was to watch it happen in real time from the outside — to see a total stranger’s search for a man named Mike Davis turn into her own small step back toward church, and her getting someone else to walk in with her.

1 Corinthians 3:6–7 says one person plants, another waters, but it’s God who makes it grow.

The real Mike Davis was trying to do something — mentor a kid, bring him to church, show up for him. He just wasn’t trying to plant something that would still be growing twenty years later, in a stranger’s search, in another man’s blog post.

Mable wasn’t trying to bring Chris back to church either.

And I definitely wasn’t trying to be part of anyone’s story when I told a stranger, politely, that she had the wrong Mike Davis.

We don’t always get to see what God is doing with what we plant.

We just have to be willing to plant. You never know your impact in the moment. You usually only find out by accident, years later, through someone else’s search.

The Question I Asked You Still Stands

At the end of the first post, I asked if there was someone from your past who shaped you more than they ever knew — and whether it might be time to tell them.

Mable didn’t wait to find out the answer for herself.

She went and found him.

I don’t know what it will do for the real Mike Davis to know Chris is back in a pew this week. I hope he gets to hear it, if he hasn’t already.

But I know what it did for the two people doing the looking.

Maybe that’s the real lesson buried under both of these posts.

It’s not just that your unknowing influence outlives you.

It’s that going looking for someone else’s influence in your life has a way of pointing you back toward God too — even when that’s not what you set out to find. You never know your impact — not really. Not until someone comes looking for it.

You don’t get to choose which moment becomes the one somebody spends twenty years remembering. So you’d better live like all of them might be.