Quiet Power
Working with Border Collies for decades has left me with an appreciation of quiet power—perhaps the only true and ultimate power that truly exists.
If you happen to be blessed by observing a herding dog competition, watch out for this. The sheep are positioned by the set out crew anywhere from two to eight hundred yards away from the handler and dog team that are presently competing. When the sheep seem settled the handler will give his Border Collie a quiet command to go either to her or his right (“away to me”), or left (“come by”).
Keep your eyes on the sheep! As soon as the dog has left the hander’s feet note what the sheep do, because they are immediately sizing up the dog’s power.
Quite often you will see the sheep getting jittery, and perhaps even running together at top speed, back for the pens they were kept in before being set out. At times they will run together in the opposite direction from whence the dog is coming at them. Sometimes they will split up and run in seemingly random directions. At times this will happen as soon as the dog leaves the handler’s feet for the outrun. At times it happens when a dog is running wide, but its shoulders turn in just enough. At times when the dog ends its outrun and begins to come up on the sheep.
The sheep are saying the dog has no quiet, or real power. It is either lacking in the best kind of herding instincts, or it is poorly or inadequately trained. It’s power is noisy. People observing may not notice, but sheep have super senses, and they know what kind of power the dog has. Noisy power like this cannot get the job done of caring for sheep.
On the other hand there will be times, hopefully more frequent times, when the sheep continue to munch grass, or look up at the dog and wait. When a well trained Border Collie with the best instincts runs out the sheep know in their bones what to do. They wait and sort of surrender to be guided by the dog. They move toward the handler in good order, turn around the handler at the post, move out, then across, then back to the handler around the course, get shed off (separated from others) as the handler and dog tell them to, and go into the pen without too much fuss.
All this is not because this handler and dog got lucky and were assigned nicer sheep. It’s because of quiet power.
A Border Collie with good instincts that is well honed by a good handler who understands the dog’s nature, and the nature of true power, will consistently have orderly sheep and good scores from the judge.
Sheep don’t want to act like “sheep.” They don’t want to be bossed around. They don’t instinctively come down hills toward people. They don’t like to go into pens or other confined places. But they also instinctively understand real power, and so they go along with dogs that handle them with respect.
I was blessed to have several dogs with quiet power. Mirk, who was trained by Bill Elliott in the hills of the Scottish Borders, came to us when foot and mouth disease limited the movement of sheep and so the need for collies in Britain. My bitch, Floss was having a terrible time herding a mother and lamb back into the barn. The mother caught Floss up against a fence and used her head as a sledge hammer trying to kill poor Floss before I could rescue her. I then called on Mirk. Mirk stood eyeball to eyeball with the ewe and gave her a moment to reconsider her abstinence. When the moment was up Mirk gave a toothless punch to the nose of the ewe and then stood back and gave her another moment. The ewe wisely backed off with her lamb into the barn.
Case closed. Quiet power—a power Mirk consistently displayed in all his dealings with different kinds of sheep in different situations—a power he passed down to his offspring—and a power I tried my best to polish through training.
The biblical book of Ephesians talks quite a bit about power. There is a nasty, death-dealing “power of the ruler of the air” that is hard at work among those who disobey God and divide people into warring camps (Ephesians 2.2). But there is a higher power that God shows in raising Christ from the dead. That same power is even now working in Christ, and, through Christ, is also working in those who are trusting and faithful toward Christ (Ephesians 1.19-21). That latter power is “high above” all others. It is genuine power. It is quiet power.
The United States is now being administered according to a false belief in noisy power. The man standing at the handler’s post loves the noise he can make on social media and photo ops. He believes that for America to be great it must be dominant in manufacturing, military might, and the ability to menace others by pushing past the boundaries of written law. He believes there is America and then there are the competitors and threats to America that must not be respected, but neutralized or destroyed.
But the quiet power that made America the super power that it was, up to January of this year, has been built on entirely other things: respectful alliances, the good of sharing wealth, the beauty of caring for the disadvantaged and suffering. Institutions such as USAID, the CDC, Voice of America, Public Broadcasting, Medicare and Medicaid, the Smithsonian Institution, and agencies of international cooperation have made America great because they are infused with the spirit of cooperation and coexistence, and have made the world better.
I have learned about quiet power from my dogs and my sheep. I pray that God will help me, the church, and our world run for the hills when they see noisy power, and instead cooperate fully with those who are filled with respect for others, and show genuine, quiet power.