Sheepdog Strategies, 2

Continued from "Sheepdog Strategies"

"She" could be your wife, daughter, fiancee, mother, sister . . . any woman you care about.

You look at your watch. She's never been this late before. You try her cell again, and you get the same recorded voice, "This party is not available . . ." Did she turn it off? Is the battery dead? Or . . . ?

The meeting at church was over hours ago. Where is she? You go over the possibilities in your mind: car trouble . . . a flat tire . . . took one of the other ladies home & lost track of the time . . . .

You deliberately shut out other possibilities. The insistent ones that hover about the edges of your consciousness with a silence that echoes in the pit of your stomach. WHERE IS SHE?

She never listened to you about taking a self-defense class, and she always put you off when you wanted to take her to the range to teach her how to use a handgun. In total frustration, you now teeter between anger and fear.

Then, headlights come into view in front of your house. Is that she . . . ? Or is that a police car . . . ?

We're Christian Martialists, and we are protective of the women we love. That's why we get so frustrated when they refuse to take the proper steps for their own safety.

In a future post I want to analyze why some women seem so averse to thinking about self-protection from possible violence. Today, however, I want to suggest a first, small step that may start that special gal thinking in the right direction.

It's a book by Keith Pascal called Tiptoeing to Tranquility. He calls it a parable because he wrote it in story form. It's about a woman with a teenage daughter who firmly rejects the idea of martial arts, but who does not feel safe, even in he own neighborhood.

Then she meets someone who gives her and her daughter lessons in living safely and tranquilly in the modern world. Further into the story, there is even a soft-sell on taking formal self defense lessons.

As with any book like this, there will be some areas with which the epistemologically (look it up) self-conscious Christian does not agree. Page 40 is a case in point.

On page 40 he refers to Soren Kirkegaard, the father of Existentialist philosophy. In that place he asserts that faith is uncertain. If he had also read Cornelius Van Til, he would realize that without true faith, nothing is certain.

Farther down the page, he makes a comment that indicates he may be familiar with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I interact more or less extensively with that work's insights and flaws in my book, Christian Methodology.

Perhaps I'll have an opportunity to discuss some of these matters with Keith, sometime, but for now let me say that the value of this book to you and particularly to the special female(s) in your life is worth it. (BTW, I have often used the areas I disagree with in a book as an occasion for discussion and learning with my wife & daughters. This increases, not decreases, the utility of a book.)

Tiptoeing to Tranquility is just a baby step in the right direction for those you care about, but it is a step, for your peace of mind and theirs, that you want them to take.

In fact, if the woman in the story at the beginning of this post had read, heeded and practiced just the first (non-martial) piece of advice described in the book, I believe the odds would have increased by more than 90% that the headlights in the drive were hers and not those of the police.

Continued in "Sheepdog Strategies, 3"