Calvary Chapel
Why Me? Sheep to wolves
31/March/2010 12:19 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Sheep: What a stupid animal,
so nondescript we really don’t know if you are
talking about a sheep, or a herd of sheep.
Wolf: A complex community forming wild dog that hunts with strength and cunning. Wolves form a community so socially complex that the pack has served as the survival model for indigenous people groups.
Left to our own wants and desires, we all evolve from a complex community of wolves into isolated, wayward, and lonely sheep.
We begin to wrap up this “Why Me?” series this week, moving from the historical context of what got us into this mess, to what we can do to move from our fears into a world in which our fears are suppressed, because of the vision of an external responsibility that in some unknown way, gives reason to all the chaos that surrounds our world.
When I was stationed in Germany during the rise of the environmental movement, without a television, I had time to read a lot of books. My educational training outside the military at that time was in secondary education and sciences. The focus of that training was in terrestrial ecology and chemistry.
Reading the environmental books that were then available I quickly became disillusioned with the whole process. Virtually all of the books began with the premise that the world was going to hell, time was of the essence that we do something about it, and then the writer appended a couple of simplistic chapters about their preliminary thoughts, that might lead to a change in the current direction.
What I have learned in the passing of time is that this type of bloviating is truly the American genre of communication, not only in writing, but also in speeches and preaching.
Did you know that before he began any speech Adolph Hitler would come to the stage, gaze into and through the crowd for two full minutes before he uttered a word? This was preceded by at least a half an hour of appropriate music to get the crowd ready for de fuehrer.
The question I have never bothered to research, did Hitler gain his speaking prowess by adapting the style of American revivalist preachers of the Second Great Awakening?
Read More...
Wolf: A complex community forming wild dog that hunts with strength and cunning. Wolves form a community so socially complex that the pack has served as the survival model for indigenous people groups.
Left to our own wants and desires, we all evolve from a complex community of wolves into isolated, wayward, and lonely sheep.
We begin to wrap up this “Why Me?” series this week, moving from the historical context of what got us into this mess, to what we can do to move from our fears into a world in which our fears are suppressed, because of the vision of an external responsibility that in some unknown way, gives reason to all the chaos that surrounds our world.
When I was stationed in Germany during the rise of the environmental movement, without a television, I had time to read a lot of books. My educational training outside the military at that time was in secondary education and sciences. The focus of that training was in terrestrial ecology and chemistry.
Reading the environmental books that were then available I quickly became disillusioned with the whole process. Virtually all of the books began with the premise that the world was going to hell, time was of the essence that we do something about it, and then the writer appended a couple of simplistic chapters about their preliminary thoughts, that might lead to a change in the current direction.
What I have learned in the passing of time is that this type of bloviating is truly the American genre of communication, not only in writing, but also in speeches and preaching.
Did you know that before he began any speech Adolph Hitler would come to the stage, gaze into and through the crowd for two full minutes before he uttered a word? This was preceded by at least a half an hour of appropriate music to get the crowd ready for de fuehrer.
The question I have never bothered to research, did Hitler gain his speaking prowess by adapting the style of American revivalist preachers of the Second Great Awakening?
Read More...