ILLUSTRATIONS FOR TEACHERS, PREACHERS, AND OTHER LEADERS www.davidjonespub.com Action over discussion: Action takes decision and movement. Scholars study much and decide little. "Scholars don’t make good managers," says one management theorist. "They are trained not to decide." There is a story told about the physicist Max Planck. When he died and went to heaven St. Peter met him at the gate saying, "Professor Planck, this door leads to the Kingdom of Heaven, but this door leads to a discussion about the Kingdom of Heaven." You know which one the scholar chose. The word decision comes from the Latin meaning "to cut off, to sever." Better to discuss things, defer judgment, refer the matter to a committee for further consideration, than to make a decision. Why go on record as believing that the earth is round when someone may discover next year that it’s really flat? Wait. Observe. Be patient. There’s still time Action: decisions alone mean little Three frogs were sitting on a log. Two decided to jump. How many frogs are left? Three. Deciding to jump means nothing. Action: do more talk and think less To help people find enlightenment, Buddha spent little time teaching people how to think. He showed little concern over what people thought. Instead, his teachings were programs for action. Jesus was similar. In the gospels, the word do shows up 487 times but the word believe is used only 88. Buddha and Jesus both emphasized action. Action: excuses A neighbor, famous for making excuses, knocked on Sophia’s door and asked to borrow a rope. “I can’t let you have my rope,” she said, “I’m using it out behind my house to tie up the wind.” “No one uses a rope to tie up the wind,” he said. “I know,” she replied, “but when you don’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as any other.” And with that, she closed the door. Action: Go before you know, not build establish or maintain, journey In Bible, Jesus says, Build 11 times. Go 111 times Send 29 times Sent 133 1 Go. Jesus disciples: Go, not build. Action: Go! Actions, Soul, known by action, choices, movement, Adler Alfred Adler says movement makes a soul. We attribute a soul only to moving, living organisms. The soul stands in innate relationship to free motion. Those organisms which are strongly rooted have no necessity for a soul. How supernatural it would be to attribute emotions and thoughts to a deeply rooted plant! There is a strict corollary between movement and psychic life. This constitutes the difference between plant and animal. In the evolution of the psychic life, therefore, we must consider everything which is connected with movement. Action: Go!, Action over thinking, Buddha, church do not think, praxis, anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly The Buddha taught that (we think too much. The Buddha taught that too much) theological speculation is about as useful as wondering what kind of arrow has struck you in the chest. You may measure it if you want to. You may develop theories about where it came from, who shot it, and what kind of wood it is made from, but all in all you time would be better spent deciding how you are going to remove it from your body. (In most eastern religions) The focus is not on orthodoxy – right belief – but orthopraxis – right practice. Do the right things. Action: Go, Larry the flying balloon truck driver Larry was a truck driver, but his lifelong dream was to fly. When he graduated from high school, he joined the Air Force in hopes of becoming a pilot. Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him. So when he finally left the service, he had to satisfy himself with watching others fly the fighter jets that crisscrossed the skies over his backyard. As Larry sat there in his lawn chair, he dreamed about the magic of flying. Then one day, Larry got an idea. He went down to the local army-navy surplus store and bought a tank of helium and forty-five weather balloons. These were not your brightly colored party balloons, these were heavy-duty spheres measuring more than four feet across when fully inflated. Back in his yard, Larry used straps to attach the balloons to his lawn chair, the kind your might have in your own back yard. He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep and inflated the balloons with helium. Then he packed some sandwiches and drinks and loaded a BB gun, figuring he could pop a few of those balloons when it was time to return to earth. His preparations complete, Larry sat in his chair and cut the anchoring cord. His plan was to lazily float back down to terra firma. But things didn’t quite work out that way. When Larry cut the cord, he didn’t float lazily up; he shot up as if fired from a cannon! Nor did he go up a couple hundred feet. He climbed and climbed until he finally leveled off at eleven thousand feet! At that height, he could hardly risk deflating any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really experience flying! So he stayed up there, sailing around for fourteen hours, totally at a loss as to how to get down. Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles International Airport. A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy in a lawn chair at eleven thousand feet with a gun in his lap. 2 LAX is right on the ocean, and you may know that at nightfall, the winds on the coast begin to change. So, as dusk fell, Larry began drifting out to sea. The Navy dispatched a helicopter to rescue him. But the rescue team had a hard time getting to him, because the draft from their propeller kept pushing his home-made contraption farther and farther away. Eventually they were able to hover over him and drop a rescue line with which they gradually hauled him back to earth. A television reporter asked him, “Mr. Walters, why did you do it?” Larry replied, “A person can’t just sit around all the time.” Some times you just got to move. Action: Leap of faith. You can’t see God but God can see you so jump. No one tells stories about commitment better than Sören Kierkegaard. That’s probably because he saw commitment as being at the core of what it means to be a Christian. Perhaps his most famous illustration of commitment is the tale he tells about a man trapped on the edge of a cliff with a raging fire burning toward him. It will only be a minute or two before the fire consumes him when he hears a voice from down below the cliff, amidst the darkness, calling, “Jump!” The man answers, “But, I can’t see you! There’s only darkness down there!” The voice from the deep shouts back, “Jump anyway. I can see you!” Kierkegaard uses this story to illustrate what he called “the leap of faith.” Kierkegaard also tells the story of a boy in a swimming pool trying to impress his father by pretending that he knows how to swim. He splashes and kicks the water with one foot and yells to his father, “Look! Look! I’m swimming!” He splashes with his arms and kicks with one leg, but he isn’t swimming—because all the time he is holding on to the bottom of the pool with the big toe of his other foot. Tony Campolo Action: Mission: Vocation, potential, future, Peter Pan, Island looking for Peter, Adventure Anyone know Peter Pan? Seen the movie? Read the book? Peter is a boy who never tires of adventure. Do you know the name of the island where Peter lives? Neverland. Peter, Wendy, John and Michael are flying toward the island, unlike the movie, in the book it takes several days, this is what it says… they drew near the Neverland; for after many moons they did reach it, and, what is more, they had been going pretty straight all the time, not perhaps so much owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was looking for them. It is only thus that any one may sight those magic shores. The island was looking for Peter! Peter just flew, and the island, adventure came looking for him. Isn’t that wonderful? Action: shows who you are: not public opinion: meanness means little A new recruit went into training at Paris Island, hoping to become a marine. He was one of those young men who seemed to be a bit out of step with the norm, and he easily became the subject of ridicule for those who enjoy picking on off beat people. In the particular barracks to which this young marine was assigned, there was an extremely high level of meanness. The other young men did everything they could to make a joke of the new recruit and to humiliate him. One day, someone came up with the bright idea that they could scare the daylights out of this young marine by dropping a disarmed hand grenade onto the floor and pretending it was about to go off. Everyone else knew about this and they were all ready to get a big laugh. The hand grenade was thrown into the middle of the floor, and the warning was yelled, “It’s a live grenade, it’s a live grenade! It’s about to explode!” They fully expected that the young man would get hysterical and perhaps jump out a window.