Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Lions & Tigers

Sorry this is late, I wasn't going to do a blog this week (I'm on vacation), but was reading today and this little tidbit just hit me for some reason.

Lions and tigers. I wasn't really reading about them, but they came up in this book as a poignant example of how we do things. Since both animals live in different regions, they generally don't see each other. But, if they come into contact, both are cats, both are territorial, and both will fight.

Now here's where it gets interesting. If a lion and a tiger fight, a tiger will win. Every time. The tiger is a better fighter than the lion. So if five lions fight five tigers it makes sense the tigers would win, right? Nope. The lions will win, again, every time.

So why is that? Because lions will fight together and tigers won't. Even if five tigers are together and they see five lions coming, they will separate and try to fight the lions by themselves. Lions are pack animals and work together, be it for dinner or for self-defense. And even the best tiger is no match for five lions.

The reason I was reading this and what got me thinking about this was the way the church works. We now have many churches all across the world. Even in my town, I put the word "church" and my zip code in Google, it turned up over 8,000 places on the map. What if we all stopped acting like tigers and started acting like lions? Even within my own church, what if all the people who say we have the same commission, the same vision, the same purpose, what if we started acting like lions? What could we do?

T

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