A young minister fresh out of seminary went to a new church and made all kinds of changes. He fired the church organist of thirty years and replaced her with a much better musician. In the church library, he replaced the King James Bibles with a newer more accurate translation. He insisted that people use the proper theological vocabulary he had learned in school. Soon, he was out of work.
Baffled, he consulted his friend Texas Buddha. “Everything I did was right. Those were all changed that needed to happen. How did I get fired?”
TB put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, “Human groups are not like automobiles where you can simply remove and replace parts. They are more like aquariums. In an aquarium, you cannot simply buy the fish and put them in water. You must wait until conditions are right and the water is a balance of acid and base. The water must have time to develop bacteria or the fish die in their own waste. Whether it is your family, workplace or church, remember the three laws of an aquarium:
-It’s not what the fish look like in the store, that matters but how they mix with each other.
-If you try to make the water too pure, the fish die.
-It’s usually the imbalance you can’t see that kills you.”
I read and re-read this. I think you are pretty much a genius.