My father had an expression which he had to use on me more than once I’m sad to say. “Stop talking through your hat” he said. I knew what he meant, that I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I’m sure he was right about that, maybe most of the time. I just didn’t care. At the teenage age, you have to go your own way and listen to your own voice. More foolish thinking on my part, but that’s how it was.
I did not like to listen to voices that I did not choose for myself and I became a bit of a contrarian. If someone said the sky was blue, I’d think on it a bit before I agreed. I didn’t buy in to others ideas so quickly, unless I knew them to be full of wisdom, not talking through their hat.
I picked up a book many years ago at Columbia Union College about managers and survival skills. It instantly spoke to me, becoming a reliable voice in my thinking. Every page it seemed to me was filled with wisdom. One of those pages had a story or a parable about a man that became a contrarian, unwilling to let the voices around him go unchallenged.
Here’s the story told by Wallace Ford that goes something like this,
Once upon a time there was a land where the whole community lived under one big glass dome. For generations the families had been born, lived and died under the glass dome. And the story that passed down from generation from generation was if you ever did step outside of the glass dome, you would surely die. So no one had ever dared to step outside it.
In fact, the community had decided that there was only one crime so dastardly that the punishment for anyone who committed that crime would be to banish him outside the dome which would be certain death.
No one — but no one — had ever committed that crime. Then one day, to the community’s horror, a man did commit such a crime.
The punishment was swift. The whole community escorted the man to the edge of the glass dome and pushed him out into the world beyond. Then they all pressed their noses to the wall of the glass dome to watch the man die.
At first, the man laid on the ground, face down, shivering in his fear of how death would come to him. His muscles were all clenched up as he braced himself for what would certainly happen.
But nothing happened. After a bit he rolled over and looked around, and seeing nothing threatening in sight, he ventured to sit up and look around. As the people in the glass dome watched intently, the man slowly stood up and looked all around him. And then, to their amazement, the man began to dance softly in the green, green grass — moving this way and that way, trying out his arms and legs that seemed to work perfectly well.
And then he began to jump up and down, and to shout joyously, and to beckon to the people under the glass dome to COME ON OUT AND DANCE WITH ME!! The people were filled with confusion and bewilderment to see this happy dancing man when they had expected to see him die a horrible death. The confusion and stress grew so great within them that they finally had to take action. They got buckets of black paint and large paintbrushes. They started at the bottom of the walls and painted the walls solid black, up as high as they could reach and as high as necessary so they could no longer see the dancing man. They then all breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the way things had been before that day.
Can you guess the mans crime? He was an Innovator.
Innovators listen to many voices, but they go about testing them, verifying them, validating them, keeping those that stand the test of time. We have many voices both inside and outside of our heads that want us to stay inside the safe and secure confines of our dome. Maybe it’s time to challenge that voice and see if it knows what it’s talking about.
I can’t tell you what voices to listen to, I can only point you to the voice that has made all the difference in my life, the Good Shepherd. If you are one of His people, you will know His voice and you will not be long led astray or fall for false living and noisy chatter. If you want to know what happened to the man in the parable, get outside of the dome and see for your self. They said he would die. He didn’t. What are they saying to you?
