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Life track with Chuck Swindall is a presentation of insight for living Canada.
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If you could be any animal, which one would you choose?
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Those are the kind of things you love to ask children.
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I can just hear some little perky girl say,
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I'd like to be a mink that way I've got a built-in fur coat.
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Or some kid will say, some boy, well, I'd like to be a gorilla.
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Get to go barefoot all day and pound on my chest and grunt and swing through the trees and be great.
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And I was a little boy, I wanted to be an elephant,
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wanted to squirt all that water through my nose.
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Although that'd be wonderful, great big ears, great big feet.
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Funny as often as I may have asked that question to children,
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I've never heard one of them say, I want to be a sheep.
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Children tend to agree with nations, no nation is chosen as sheep as an emblem.
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We here in the United States have chosen an eagle,
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stately gallant eagle, soaring high,
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always impressive in flight,
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Across the Atlantic, great Britain has chosen the lion, of course,
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standing guard of the gate.
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Russia, the top of the food chain, the bear.
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Sometime ago a man wrote a book in which he called us a nation of sheep,
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and we rightly took it as an insult.
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We're not a nation of sheep.
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I mean, stop and think, the resume of sheep,
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you're really not that impressive.
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Sheep lack any sense of direction.
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They easily get lost.
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Sheep are virtually defenseless.
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They don't have claws or sharp teeth.
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They're not camouflage.
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Those spindly legs, they can't run.
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And you ever heard one growl?
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That's not going to scare any animal ever.
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They're not intimidating.
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They're easily frightened, they're easily panicked.
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They're quite honestly dirty and unkept.
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Have a friend of mine who kept sheep for a summer.
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Ever seen a northbound end of a southbound sheep?
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They're unable to find their own nourishment, food or water.
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The only worthwhile thing they ever produce
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is taken from them on a regular basis.
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They just lie down and give it up.
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Put bluntly, sheep are stupid.
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You and I have never seen a circus act of trained sheep ever
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because you can't train them.
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I'm indebted to Ron Allen for this insight.
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As he writes of it in his fine work, Lord of Song.
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Hill sides in the Judean wilderness are scored
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with parallel paths moving along the contours of the hillside.
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Once we stopped a bedo and shepherd
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and spoke to him with the aid of our Arabic-speaking driver.
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After some polite preliminaries, we asked why it was
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that he was on that path and not on another.
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Because this is my path for my sheep.
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Each path was the path of a particular shepherd.
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As he would walk his path, his sheep would follow along
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behind in single file, keeping to the right rut.
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Isn't that good wording? The right rut.
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Reminds me of the sign that appears just as you go into Alaska.
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Choose your rut carefully.
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You'll be in it for the next 200 miles.
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This is the right rut, with no shepherd the sheep
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would scatter all over the hillside.
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We're all like sheep, and we need a shepherd.
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Fortunately, we have one, Jesus Christ.
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He guides us, protects us, and keeps us in the right rut.
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Listen to more of Chuck Swindall's Life Track messages
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at lifetrack.ca. That's L-I-F-E-T-R-A-C.
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Life track, where life and truth meet.
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The preceding Life Track presentation was brought to you
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by Insight for Living Canada.
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The original message, God's comfort in Psalm 23,
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was copyrighted in 2005, and the Life Track sound recording
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was copyrighted in 2012 by Charles R. Swindall Incorporated.
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All rights are reserved worldwide.