The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? Sheep to wolves

31 March 2010

Volume 12, Issue 13

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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?

All this is to point out that the solutions to the problems facing America today will not be solved by oratory. That is true with Barack Obama, who’s teleprompter delivered speeches, are crafted to say what the President wants to say and not get off the carefully scripted material. Perhaps he believes that his words create reality, just like word-faith evangelicals. More in the extemporaneous line, this American oratory method was also true with Sarah Palin speaking to Tea Party people last weekend in Searchlight, Nevada, or Glenn Beck at his America Revival at Orlando, Florida.

The crisis in the United States, and the world for that matter, is not the absence of pontificators, but the absence of true leaders, training programs, workshops, and opportunities that focus upon human responsibility — rather than politics.

To illustrate just how messed up the United States has become, we look to the Federal Government in Washington DC, to solve local and regional problems. The old saying that politics is local as been replaced with the Washington based messiah. That did not begin with Barack Obama, but has become a folk truth or myth for as long as I can remember, and would probably be true at least since the start of the Great Depression.

I began working on “Sheep to Wolves” when I was still in Seattle. The emphasis for that desire came from the Northwest Pastors and Leaders Conference for Calvary Chapel. This yearly get together was basically designed for regional pastors and leaders from small and independent church planting efforts, there to fellowship and get some much needed mutual support. Area Calvary Chapel megachurches normally held their own conference, utilizing there own resources and their own networks.

Anyway each year there would be a significant number of leader dawned T-shirts that read, “Calvary Chapel Nowhere, Where the Sheep are Fed.” In a nondenominational denomination that prided itself on Biblical exposition, it seemed to me that the metaphor of being a stupid sheep that spends its life getting a couple of hours a week receiving systematic Bible teaching was, is, and should not be Biblical Christian allegory at anytime.

The Bible also describes how wolves eat the sheep and the lambs. If any external metaphor describes American evangelicalism today, that is probably our best allegory. This is also true with internal wolves in sheep’s clothing.

During the move to Eastern Washington the whole sheep to wolves concept got shut down, but during that first winter I was able to read, watch, and understand a great deal about nature’s most misunderstood wild animals.

What got be to thinking about the topic again was a recent article I read that said that researchers had found that domestic dog breeds were more closely genetically related to middle eastern wolves, than wolves of any other area, or any other wild dog breed. From a creation science perspective I would give that a less than resounding, “Duh.”

Generally the creation science understanding goes this way. It has been known for a very long time that domestic dogs were bred out of wild wolf populations. Wolves were “a kind” carried on the ark by Noah, the ark came to rest in the mountains of Ararat in the Middle East, dogs were bred from Middle Eastern wolves, and the rest of the world’s wolf populations also continued to move out from and to genetically diversify from those original ark born wolves.

Somewhat off the wolf subject, but relating to creation science, flipping through the channels recently I just happened to come across a discussion of a sixteenth century European map of essentially the Atlantic Ocean top to bottom. The map showed that Greenland was green and also Antarctica was also ice-free. Furthermore you could virtually overlay a current map of the same area and find little difference.

The major topic however was not really the map, but evolving science showed that Antarctica had been glaciated for at least hundreds of thousands of years and hence the map had to have been constructed by aliens flying over the earth and mapping the area with some sort of ice penetrating radar or some other highly advanced geological mapping technology.

Way too speculative on this evolving uniformitarian paradigm was that a really smart person could have produced the map sometime after the Genesis flood and before the following ice age. A copy of that map may have survived in some form for a few thousand years after the ice melted everywhere but in Greenland and Antarctica. That would also prove some real global warming, however that would be unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions created by mankind, burning pre-flood, converted biomass.

Granting the fact that wildness, either alive or dead, is the only real persistent perceived external risk to postmodern materialism, it still doesn’t account for the human fear of wolves throughout recorded history. I would submit that from the wolf’s perspective they were probably the natural example for the original model for human survival mechanisms in the post flood wilderness. In essence we copied “The Book of Wolves” and made it our own.

It is also interesting out of all the attacks on humans by wild animals, there is no documented case that wolves have ever attacked and killed a human. Yet at the same time all wolf research has shown that wolves really are not afraid of humans, even armed humans. Furthermore no other animal really has such a feared mythology than that of the big bad wolf, the werewolf, the wolf pack. Could these mutual relationships all stem from a history not that long ago, when man really needed a best friend in the wilderness, and to some extent the bond is still understood on both sides of the equation.

Wolves still are not present in this region of Nowhere. There was however, a verified wolf kill of a calf on this side of the Canadian border a couple of years ago, less than 15 miles away. However about a year ago my neighbor heard a noise outside and when he went outside was confronted with a whitish big wolf like presence. For a brief time they stood there staring at one another.

Finally when my neighbor went back into his cabin to get some resources to investigate further, the animal disappeared. This animal was of different color than a coyote, much bigger, and a different shaped head. Also a coyote will never hold his ground when confronted with a human, so we are left to conclude that it was a young wolf passing through the territory, perhaps looking for a female and a place to form a pack.

Why would you like to be a wolf? The contrast makes logical sense if you have only the option of being forever branded as a stupid sheep. Furthermore sheep are herded from one pasture to another. For example just recently we have added a new healthcare pasture, generally known as ObamaCare. This pasture is directly tied to your future pastures called Social Security and Medicare. The problem with all these pastures is that they all are really desert pastures and they are all overgrazed, and we are told that overgrazing will get much worse in the not too distant future.

Contrasted with other animals, wolves enjoy a complex community. However it is not a democracy, there are distinct social relationships. The whole concept of “Why Me?” could never exist in a wolf pack. But then again no wolf would go to a non-rewarding job year after year, with only the promise of furnished healthcare and a future pension that will evaporate before you get old enough to use it.

Wolves don’t go to revivals, Tea Parties, political events, or any other similar happenings, except perhaps to observe the herd behavior of the sheep. Furthermore wolves don’t believe in the power of civil protest, after all Gandhi was a Hindu not a Christian or even a classic deist. Getting all the karma aligned only makes sense if you believe in something as abstract as karma. Christians and especially Christian wolves believe in the power of God to bring about change. Jesus may have held large meetings, but it was not to protest Jewish discrimination of the Gentiles, or to get healthcare for Israel from the Romans.

Probably the best example of the action of human wolves would be in the military. Now when sheep think of the military, they think of guns and killing and all the bad, dirty, and scary stuff. That happened back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when armies walked and possessed the land. Today in the era of counter insurgency warfare, war is more about changing the understanding of the domestic sheep rather then blowing them to hell.

That leaves the insurgents to be the primitive, bomb throwers and violence producers. One of the first and foremost things you learn in the real military is that real war is hell, humans were not created for hell, hence the violence of war is to be used only as a last resort to send warlords to there desired eternal home.

In the American Revolution the British were the insurgents. In most of American Indian wars US troops were the insurgents. It seems we humans have a hard time learning from our history and unlike real wolves we have a recorded history we can read.

The truly scary thing about the twentieth century for both sheep and wolves is that it was the bloodiest century in history, because of people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and a long list of others, trying to reorder society from the barrel of a gun. The death toll of just those three exceeds well over 100 million men, women, and children.

Wolves’ role in God’s current natural order is to help keep the strong — strong. The leftist dictators above substituted their view of evolution to maintain the weakness of their elitist human philosophy in national power. In other words they hijacked true natural law to further their own ends and substituted their specific evil sheepherding for the common good.

In a somewhat related application, the weakness of the United States is essentially centered politically in Washington DC and financially in the fact we have been living beyond our means for at least a half a century. To blame Barack Obama for being the cause of our problems gives him way too much credit. At best, on the other side of all if this, he will be remembered as a catalyst, for his concepts of change have been tried elsewhere and always found wanting.

To say if we vote him and his communist — socialist friends out of office will fix the problem is basically the bah-bah-bah response of a sheep. Call Rush, or Glenn, or one of the other talk radio hosts and if you wait your turn you might get a BAH the whole world will hear (for a few seconds). What part of entertainment don’t you understand?

The morphing of sheep to wolves requires much more than converting a bah to a howl, it demands a complete change of our current sheep worldview. Probably the best example of that transformation took place when a group of cantankerous men signed a document that closed with the words:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

The Divine Providence converted sheep to wolves and brought them through the trial, for the document they signed was the Declaration of Independence — July 4, 1776.