Crisis Management from the Divine Perspective!
Wade Trimmer
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Today we are bombarded on every hand with crisis after crisis and doomsayers who take some of the many “fake crisis” (not all are fake) and current trends and extrapolate them into the future as means of predicting ultimate destruction unless there is immediate action by the global community, i.e. government take over and planning everything for everyone from cradle to grave.
We are told by the experts that Mother Earth is overpopulated, exploited, and polluted. It is pontificated that without radical global government intervention, people left to themselves will continue to do silly, selfish, and destructive things like breeding mindlessly, raping the earth, stripping it of its resources, poisoning the air, water, and land, killing off all the wildlife, and releasing chemicals that burn holes in the ozone layer and cause global warming. They then bring to the world stage through every media outlet available the great scientific experts with their facts, figures, and statistics to prove that we are on the brink of ruin and destruction without world government intervention. (Someone said, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.)
The facts are that the lament of over-population and shortages leading to disaster are as old as recorded history.
Did you ever hear of the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894?
Steven Davies, a senior lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, has written about this crisis and drawn some lessons from it, referring to it as the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894, the name it is known by in internet discussions.
Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.
It seemed that “The End of Civilization As They Knew It” would be brought about, not by a meteor strike, global sickness, too big a carbon footprint, or warfare, but by an excess of manure, by the urban horses.
In 1898 the first international urban planning conference convened in New York. One topic dominated discussion: MANURE. Cities all over the world, including Sydney, Australia were experiencing the same problem. Unable to see any solution to the manure crisis, the delegates abandoned the conference after three days instead of the scheduled ten days!
Until the advent of motor vehicles, the main form of transportation, whether of people or goods, was by horse. By 1880 the horse population had reached problem levels. The cities functioned on horse power, literally. London (then the largest city in the world) in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all drawn by horses. There were also several thousand buses, each needing 12 horses per day. There were also various carts, drays, wagons and buggies for the transportation of goods and persons.
Reliance upon equine transportation produced unpleasant consequences such as urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, and traffic accidents. The main problem, however, was manure. In New York City in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced nearly 1,200 metric tons of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. In addition, each horse produces nearly a liter of urine per day, which also ended up on the streets.
This huge amount of manure created some serious problems such as attracting large numbers of flies and the spreading of disease, In the summer, it dried and turned to dust, being blown by the wind onto people and coating buildings. In wet weather it turned into mushy, stinky mire.
For several years farmers had paid stable owners for the manure to use as fertilizer, but by 1900 it was so plentiful that the stable owners had to pay the farmers to take it away. In summer, the farmers found it difficult to leave their crops to collect manure. City officials and residents began to pile the manure on vacant lots in the US cities, with some lots having manure mountains up to 75 ft high.
Then, in a few short years, the crisis passed. It wasn’t resolved by big governments stepping in to save the day. But by men like Henry Ford and John David Rockefeller, and others like them, as millions of horses were replaced by millions of gasoline powered motor vehicles.
Cars were cheaper to own and operate than horse-drawn vehicles, both for the individual and for society and did not cause near the pollution problems. In 1900, 4,192 cars were sold in the US; by 1912 that number had risen to 356,000. In 1912, traffic counts in New York showed more cars than horses for the first time.
Today we are told that an avalanche of earth destroying crisis have already reached critical mass. Take your pick of the multitude of crisis issues: global warming; pollution; greenhouse gases; population increase; food and water shortages, nuclear weapons proliferation; increasing world tensions and terrorism; diminishing fish stocks in the oceans, etc. All these have created a worldwide fear that man faces a geophysical apocalypse, a global crisis that demands a global solution. It has generated widespread efforts by educational, media, and political elite to convince the world that the “science is settled” and action is needed now.
According to Professor Stephen Davies: “The fundamental problem with most predictions of this kind, and particularly the gloomy ones, is that they make a critical, false assumption: that things will go on as they are. This assumption in turn comes from overlooking one of the basic insights of economics: that people respond to incentives. In a system of free exchange, people receive all kinds of signals that lead them to solve problems.”
How do you view the world? Do you live with a view that confidently assumes that there is enough to go around, (and therefore enough for me also) or do you live with the view that scarcity is the order of the day? Do you believe that God still replenishes and restores the earth in abundance, or that the God of original creation has somehow gotten miffed at us and shut down most of His renewing and restoring accounts and left us to just barely get by?
The way you answer the above questions determines how you make decisions about family, friends, foreigners, finances, and the future of the earth.
We must reorient our thinking to Crisis Management from the Divine Perspective! We must begin think in terms of living in God’s abundance. We must live with a concept of God and His Word that empowers us to live by investing in relationships with overflowing life, love and labors, and becoming good stewards of His earth. We must employ Biblical principles, with a free market of ideas and opportunities that are open to and rewarding of those who desire to make life better for the present and future generations and extend the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth until the end of time.
Although the manure of a different kind is getting quite deep, if we return to the biblical principles that has resolved multitudes of serious crisis so far, we can see a brighter, happier, greener, and cleaner tomorrow.
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Wade Trimmer has been in full-time Christian service since 1971, thirty-five of those years as a senior pastor. He pastored Grace Fellowship of Augusta for 30 of those years.
In 2008, Pastor Wade formed Training for Reigning Institute of Disciple-making, a non-profit organization, for the purpose of equipping leaders, especially in Third World countries in being more effective in carrying out the Great Commission (Visit website:TRIDM.org). The past 9 years have taken Pastor Wade outside the USA to more than 25 different nations.
He is the author of 46 books, a conference speaker and leader of international mission’s training. He is married to Anne and they have three grown children, five grandchildren, and five great grandchildren. They are members of Grace Fellowship of Augusta, Georgia and make their home in North Augusta, South Carolina.
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