The Power Of A Village

On this, the evening after the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on a more serious topic of global magnitude.  Namely, how we can move forward as a nation and a world given the continued threat and uprising of violent extremists (known to some as "jihadists") and all things terroristic and destructive.  Here's the good news and the really bad news.  The good news and the bad news is that we, in the West, can really not, to any substantial degree, do anything about it.  We cannot negotiate terrorism into submission, we cannot mitigate terrorism into submission, we cannot bomb terrorism into submission. These problems, namely located in the Middle East, predate America by many thousands of years.  The answers and the solutions must arise from the same places from whence the conflicts emerge.  We must discover once again,

The Power Of A Village

Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, recently reflected on this very dynamic, and his experiences of being in the Middle East during the Intifada and of speaking with leaders of both Muslim and extremist Islamic countries.   While he was on assignment in the Middle East during the 9/11 attacks, a wise leader told Tom Friedman that there was effectively nothing that America could do to stop these calamities.  He said that the only way these problems could be solved is if the countries and the cultures that were producing these terrorists would have the courage to dig down deep and to confront the terrorists themselves.  In short, "the village would have to rise up and confront these challenges of the village."  That, there is:

The Power of A Village

Having reflected on Tom Friedman's brilliant thoughts for the past 24 hours, I have to concur.  If two people, who you do not know, earnestly want to have a fight with one another, there is pretty much nothing that you can do to stop them from having a fight.  And, if an individual emerges from a community that is fighting within itself, that wants to do harm to others, there is nothing that can be done to stop that person.  But, on the other hand, if there is someone in a group who is causing problems, but the group decides that that person will not be allowed to cause problems any longer, the group can always rise up, and sequester that individual.  It's:

The Power of A Village

On a much smaller scale from global terrorism, I will never forget a situation my father once told me about in one of the churches he served in his ministry.  I will not mention the church specifically, or the exact situation, but I will say that the main perpetrator of the problems in that church was a person named Ivan.  For the purposes of this blog post, we will call him "Ivan the Terrible".  Ivan was against everything that my Dad was trying to do in this church.  Children's Ministries, good management, healthy structures, Ivan was against all of it.  Ivan was against everything - period!  If there was a new idea, Ivan was against it.  One day, so the story goes, there was an "All Church Work Day".  The whole church were assembled on a Saturday afternoon to work on the church grounds.  Ivan came on that day not to plant flowers, but to plant negativity.  Ivan moved from one group to the next saying negative things.  Dad intuitively knew that many of these negative comments were about him.  But he didn't know what to do about it.

But then, all of a sudden, an incredible thing happened.  A handful of eight of the most wise and sagacious members of the church all walked up to Ivan.  They circled him, and the spoke to him.  The appearance of this conversation across the entire church yard was serious.  No one will know for sure what exactly was said during that meeting - but one thing was certain.  After the group conference of "The Village Leaders", Ivan got in his car and he peeled out of the church parking lot, and he drove himself home.  Ivan was never negative again.  Why?  Because Ivan heard the voice of God and decided to turn his heart towards holiness?  No.  Because of:

The Power of the Village

One of the things I have noticed as a father of two young daughters (4 and 8) is that I have a choice between either being a "referee father" or an "encouraging coach father".  If I play the role of the referee, I will be sitting in my office and hear the girls playing and one person will do something mean to the other person and I will have to constantly say; "Hey, don't do that, that's not ok, be nice..."  But, on the other hand, if I play the role of the "encouraging coach father", when I hear them playing well and getting along, I say, "Hey, you guys are playing so great together, I'm so impressed."  What I mean by this is that "The Village" (even the village of two youngsters in my nuclear family) has an ability to regulate itself, and to modify its own behavior much better than I can do.  It's:

The Power of the Village

Sadly, it won't be until the communities that produce the terrorists in the world can rise up, and like the church work day that I experienced as a youth, circle around the bully of "Ivan the Terrible" and decide that that behavior is not acceptable, and must be brought to heal, that terrorism will really find an end in this world.  In the mean time we can all build our own healthy villages that play among ourselves with health and love and life.

All For Now,

GB