Lead Us

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. The problems with so many old sayings is that most of us have no idea what they really mean because we have no experience with the actions referenced in the proverb. How many of us have tried leading a horse anywhere? Or tried to make a horse drink? Being from Kentucky, I have encountered a horse or two, and one thing I can tell you is that horses have muscles. Horses do not get sand kicked in their faces at the beach. The neck of a horse will not be bent if said horse does not want it bent. And so, you are going to have difficulty getting a horse to bend its neck to take a drink if that horse does not want a drink. The proverb suggests that any of us, horses or otherwise, will only do what we want to do.

The other leading allusion that comes to mind, of course, is "He leads me by still waters. . . ." (I have blended a couple of translations here, I think, but it still carries the same meaning. The juxtaposition of leading and water is, I think, just coincidence--though coincidence is just another name we use for God when we aren't looking carefully enough.) In the psalm, we are reminded that God, as our shepherd, takes care of us and does not let us drink from the stagnant water, urging us instead to drink from the running water--the living water. It always amazes me, fills me joy and wonder, how much the Old Testament celebrates Christ. All the pieces fit together so beautifully and perfectly, and I feel truly blessed to be able to glimpse just a tiny bit of the glory that is God (as I cannot even begin to comprehend the whole of Him).

The idea of being lead, though popular in our language as evinced in these two examples, is close to anathema for much of our population. As Americans, we feel that being lead is a sign of weakness and represents a loss of freedom--and freedom is essential to our identity. So, asking God to lead us, while it may seem an easy and natural thing to do as part of our Christianity, is in fact a challenge.

A scene from Dead Poets Society illustrates the bicephalic serpent of our attitude about being lead--but perhaps instead of a two-headed snake, a more appropriate analogy would be the pushmi-pullyu from Dr. Doolittle, the unfortunate creature with a head at either end of its body, resulting in its being able to go nowhere because it is always struggling against itself. In Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams, takes the boys to the courtyard outside the classroom building and tells them to walk around. As the volunteers for the experiment stroll about, they find themselves falling into line and into step with one another--they begin to play an accidental game of follow-the-leader. Keating invokes Henry David Thoreau to explain the phenomenon (although Ralph Waldo Emerson could have served just as well, having the same Transcendentalist worldview and the requisite three names): we tend to follow the routes laid out for us and avoid being different.

As much as we value individuality in our culture, we all tend to be horribly afraid of standing out. So, on the one hand we do not want to be different, but on the other we do not want to appear to be letting others tell us what to do. Like the pushmi-pullyu, we may well end up unable to move because we are being tugged in two opposite directions.

Or perhaps the directions are not so opposite as they at first appear.

Our idea about being independent, about not following the leader, is that it means we are in control. It means that we have made the choices and that we have used our minds, our wills, our selves to end up on the path we are on. Being independent means that we have not let someone else tell us what to do. Or does it? Being independent just for the sake of being independent--what my grandmother might have called "being contrary"--is not always truly thinking for ourselves. If we are making our choices as a reaction against what we perceive as being told what to do, then we are just as guilty of not thinking as if we had blindly followed the leader to begin with. On the other hand, if we do think about the options and end up following the leader, then we have made a choice after using our minds. It is all a matter of free will.

As Christians, we have to realize that following Christ is a choice, and that choices are conscious. We cannot be Christian without exercising our free will. Accepting that we need to follow Christ is not unlike accepting that we sometimes have to stop for directions when we are driving. Stereotype though it may be, many men do not want to stop to ask directions. We want to find the way on our own. We are stubborn. However, we have to be careful about asking for directions. Accepting driving directions from the wrong person can result in our being more lost than we were, further from where we wanted to be and closer to being out of gas and stranded. Likewise, we need to understand that the leader we are following in our spiritual journey should be God--not the church, not the person who wrote the book we read, not the minister or the Sunday School teacher or anyone else. We have to have a personal relationship with God, through Jesus Christ, in order to be led in the right direction.

Asking God to lead us is not a sign of weakness. We are showing our strength in giving our lives back to Him. Two very British images come to mind as I write this: the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V and scenes of Hyacinth telling her husband Richard how to drive in the Brit-com Keeping Up Appearances. In Shakespeare's play, Harry rallies his troops with an impassioned speech about how history--and they, themselves--will remember them after their battle. In the television comedy, Hyacinth Bucket gives her long-suffering husband Richard driving instructions any time they are in the car, telling him to "mind the pedestrian," even when said pedestrian is on the sidewalk, no where near their vehicle.

The reason I think of these two images is that in both cases, characters are allowing themselves to be controlled by forces beyond themselves: the motley crew of soldiers under Harry's command are acting either because they want to please the king or because they want history to remember them kindly; Richard acts the way he does to avoid having further complications with his wife. In both situations, the decision is forced, in some way, by a selfish motivation--wanting to be a hero in history's retelling of the event or avoiding the pain of a shrewish wife's tongue. God does not operate in the same way; he does not want us to make our decisions based on what is best for us. Our decision to follow should be selfless. We are Christians, we are supposed to be Christ-like; therefore, we should attempt the same kind of selflessness that Christ exhibited in his decision at Gethsemene.

Accepting a leader, then, is not a passive thing. Accepting Christ, accepting God as the Leader in our lives, requires action. We must choose, and then we must continue to act. We have to remember that action and reaction are not the same thing. And most importantly, we have to be honest and sincere in our decision to follow.

And

Conjunctions connect things, as we learned long ago from the conductor singing "Conjunction Junction (What's Your Function)" on Saturday mornings. There are many flavors of conjunctions, but the most common are the coordinating conjunctions--the ones that connect grammatically equivalent things (nouns with nouns, phrases with phrases, adjectives with adjectives). And is the most often used of these, linking one of something to next and to the next.

And means that there is something else. As Christians, we have to remember that there is always something next, that there is always an and. For us, actually, there are two ands we have to consider: the and of this life and the and of the next.

The and of this life reminds us that we are never finished being Christians. Being Christian is a process, not a product. We cannot say, "Okay, I'm done," and go merrily on our way. Being Christian is about becoming Christlike, and none of us is ever going to be completely and forever Christlike. Be Christian is a journey, and so long as we remain in this life, we have the next step to consider. No matter what we have done, good or bad, we have the next moment, the next hour, the next day to live, and living--as a Christian--means striving to be like Christ.

Some might say that becoming Christian is merely a matter of accepting Christ, and in one sense they are correct; however, we all have to realize that accepting Christ is just the beginning of the journey, and that if we are sincere in our commitment, we are undertaking the task of living our lives as Christ would live. We must also accept that we will fail, over and over again. We cannot be Christ. We can only strive to be Christ-like, and that will require us to try over and over and over again.

The performance artist Laurie Anderson observed that walking is falling and catching oneself--over and over. Walking the Christian walk is no different. We are constantly catching ourselves, and we continue on.

So we live with and as a constant. The ands of this life end only with this life; but, that brings us to the other kind of and: the and that connects this life and the next.

I often have a difficult time convincing students that there is a connection between the work they do and the grades they receive; I have an even more difficult time getting them to see the connection between what they are doing in high school and the things that are coming up after graduation. Students sometimes have trouble seeing connections. We, as Christians, need to be able to see the connections inherent in our lives--both the temporal and the eternal.

The crux of the connection between this life and the next is Christ. We must start by accepting Christ as our Saviour, but we cannot quit at that point. Accepting Christ is a first step, but, as already suggested, our life with Christ is a journey and we have to continue to recommit ourselves to Him daily. The root word of journey is journ, Latin for day. Our journey is a day-by-day experience. We must keep moving forward, toward our goal, else we will stagnate. Too many of us hold onto the idea that accepting Christ is enough--which is and is not true. Accepting Christ is all we have to do, but once we have accepted, we cannot stop because by our acceptance we have not only accepted Christ and His gift of salvation but also His charge to be His force in the world.

This is not to say that we can do anything to enhance our afterlife experience. We are told that heaven is the result of accepting Christ. However, as we have observed earlier, accepting Christ means accepting His lifestyle; therefore, once we accept Christ, we have accepted that we will do our best to live as He would. Ultimately, the two ands of being Christian are pretty much the same thing.