I was trying to explain to one of my Bible students the principle behind the following statement by Paul, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Rom 7:15) I then remembered the story of two wolves that I had heard in the movie, The Matrix. The story is actually an old Cherokee Indian tale. We all want to the right thing, the altruistic thing, the loving thing, and the caring thing, but our natural selfish and egocentric nature seems to always get in the way. In order to explain this principle, I described what the old Cherokee said in the story when a child asked him, “Why do people fight?” The old Indian answered, “We all have two wolves inside us, There is a white wolf and a black wolf. These wolves are constantly fighting each other. The black wolf is filled with fear, anger, envy, jealousy, greed, and arrogance. The white wolf is filled with peace, love, hope, courage, humility, compassion, and faith. They battle constantly”. The child then asked, “But which wolf wins?”. The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one that we feed.” There is another twist to the story. The black wolf may sometimes deceive us into feeding him by pretending he is a white wolf. He might even convince us that white is black and black is white. With time, we may tend to believe it. As Thomas Paine said, “A long habit of not thinking something is wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right!” And what is the moral of the story? It is important for us to know who we feed in us. Do we feed our natural animalistic instinct that leads us towards a spirit of fear, anger, envy, jealousy, greed, and arrogance? Or do we feed our God-given ability to promote peace, love, hope, courage, humility, compassion, and faith? We are the ones who hold the key because we are the ones who hold the food box through our media intake, our inner thoughts, and the company we keep. These two wolves do eat different food and we need to make sure to feed the right one as it is the strongest of the two who will rule over our lives.
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