Welcome to the John Mark Comer Teaching's Podcast by Practicing the Way.

This teaching was first given at Bridgown Church in Portland, Oregon as a part of the community practice.

The journalist Sebastian Younger in his book,

tribe tells the story of an odd phenomenon in early American history.

In the 18th century, up and down the eastern seaboard, you had two groups of people living side by side.

You had the indigenous people living the way they did 15,000 years ago

in the Stone Age, really no different.

And then you had the colonist, White, for the most part,

British, who were living at the apex of Western civilization.

And a number of colonists began to defect to go and live among the indigenous people.

But the odd thing was, and here's the phenomenon,

the traffic only went one way.

We have no records, and it could be a thing,

but we have no records of indigenous people

of their own free will coming to live with the colonist.

Benjamin Franklin in a letter to a friend in 1753 said of colonists who were captured

in a raid and then were later saved and brought back to the colony, quote,

though ransomed by their friends and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English,

yet in a short time they become disgusted

with our manner of life

and take the first good opportunity of escaping again

into the woods.

...