Old Dog V
Field Of Experience
Bob Neumann
Each of us is a walking book to be remembered and read whenever required. While everything in our lives from birth to death can be labeled as experience, we need to fine tune this as best and efficiently as possible. All learning can be chalked up to experience. The simplest way of learning is trial and error. A baby, often with assistance, will ‘learn’ to hold his head up, roll over, and sit up. It takes repetition to make it a ‘skill’. But all these can be thought of as universal. All healthy children will grow, learn, and hopefully ‘thrive’.
Yet we have begun to learn that ‘thriving’ goes beyond gaining weight and acquiring motor skills. All babies need to be held, spoken to, ‘loved’. Not all GOD’S KIDS have gotten healthy shares of ‘love’. Most emotions we experience, we personally label and categorize in this thing called the soul. A normal person has had a share of good and bad. How one copes and goes on is the critical issue.
In South Florida a few years ago we encountered a major stressor in our lives known world wide as Hurricane Andrew. In this time, numerous lessons were learned about the human condition which are even now being played out. All of us, when we climbed out of the rubble, reacted in very different ways. Some said “Wow!’ and immediately began to clean up and rebuild. Their ‘life experiences’ had forged in them different ways of ‘coping’ with the stress. Often it was in physical action. Hurry….Hurry….Hurry. The whys were always interesting and varied.
Some were fatalistic and ‘knew’ another storm was around the corner, and wanted to be ready to meet the next one head on again.
There were some that kept super busy to escape the grief and pain they were continuously running away from – yet never really succeeding.
Some were overly aggressive, rude, short tempered in their rush to do, simply because the fear and intimidation they were enslaved to was kept hidden by their ‘mask’ of overcompensation for their sense of inferiority.
Then there were those who crawled out, sat down, and cried: perpetual victims of situations and events. Many still, after all these years, speak as if it happened yesterday. Many never finished rebuilding. Each year the media will make the public ”aware” of the hurricane season and invariably will find a large number of these ”fear filled” people to push their agenda. The real tragedy is the children who parents claim have nightmares and behavioral problems, all associated with this single trauma/crisis.
Children 7 and 8 years old giving graphic remembrances of ‘the night ANDREW came’ grabs the attention of the TV viewers. In me it raises red flags of discernment. A child under two will not grasp details and recall them on queue as these children do. Then those who were infants and unborn ‘sharing’ the same fears is not natural. It is contrived to create more victims.
Finally there is the strange group of people who climbed out of the rubble, counted noses, took a deep breath, and went to their neighbors and helped them to get out of the rubble. They rebuilt their own homes, and their community. But they took their time and were able to rise above the incident. They remember, but the memory does not control or rule their lives.
The FIELD of EXPERIENCE is comprised of all these emotions and memories, tragedies and victories, tears and laughs that have shaped our characters one way or another. They are ‘the baggage we carry around because they are part of us, like it or not. It is only when the baggage has a “life of its own” that it begins to first dictate our reactions to the stressors in our lives. Eventually it will take control, and life becomes a series of ”emotional reactions” with one emergency followed by another.
When we judge anything by THE MOST HOLY SPIRIT we cannot confuse the flavors we pick up with THE WORD itself. Consider the possibility that a LOVING ABBA would purposefully use a person to add that ‘flavor’ and make us to go deeper than THE WORD. Does this ’emotion’, ‘urgency’, ‘fervor’, accentuate THE WORD…..or detract from it?? SELAH…
If you pondered this one question seriously, then I ask you to judge this….
Acts 21:10 And as we tarried there many days, there came down from Judea a certain prophet, named Agabus
11 And when he was come unto us, he took Paul’s girdle, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, Thus saith the Holy Ghost, So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles
12 And when we heard these things, both we, and they of that place, besought him not to go up to Jerusalem
13 Then Paul answered, What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? For I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus
14 And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done
15 And after those days we took up our carriages, and went up to Jerusalem
Today we could say ‘ain’t that melodramatic’, or we could pigeonhole it and say, well it has a sense of ‘foreboding’, ‘doom and gloom’, and ‘crass emotionalism’. But we know with 20/20 hindsight the validity and the integrity of old Agabus, something I and no one else has earned because of the matter of record.
Up Next: Field Of Expertise