We're discussing this over on JWR:
http://www.jehovahswitnessrecovery.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=12805
A jdub has posted a video of a talk that Stephen Lett, a member of the Governing Body, just gave at a Special Assembly Day in Iowa. He gave an illustration at the end of it, which I've transcribed here:
Have you ever really wondered how long forever is? Let me just give you a little illustration to help us appreciate how long forever is, which is the prize for those that do jehovah's will. Now you've got to have a lot of imagination for this. I want you to imagine the Grand Canyon. Huge, vast. You walk to the edge, it makes you dizzy. You look down, the Colorado River looks like a little trickle going through there, but really it's a big, rushing, rolling river. You're so far away that it looks small in the distance. Now imagine that a little tiny parakeet goes to a beach in Florida and gets one tiny individual grain of sand in its beak. He flies back over the middle of the Grand Canyon and drops it in the Grand Canyon. Now another parakeet does this, ten thousand years later... takes a piece of sand and drops it in the Grand Canyon. This process is repeated over and over again... one grain of sand every ten thousand years. Now you can imagine how long it would take to fill up a teaspoon. But when that process is repeated over and over again, until the Grand Canyon is totally filled... in fact, it's not only filled... there are huge mountains where the Grand Canyon used to be. There's snow in the top of these mountains. People are skiing out of the top of these mountains. (Audience laughs.) When that happens... forever has just barely begun. (Laughter.) Now I probably gave you a headache. (More laughter.) But don't miss that prize of everlasting life.
Someone on JWR did a simple Google search for "parakeet sand forever"... and found that Lett borrowed his parakeet illustration from the book Ministry Is...: How to Serve Jesus with Passion and Confidence by Dave Earley and Ben Gutierrez.
Dr. Dave Earley is currently is Chairman of the Department of Pastoral Ministries and Church Expansion at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.(ww.liberty.edu/academics/religion/seminary/ He also serves as Director of the Center for Ministry Training at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Director of the Center for Church Planting of Liberty University. (www.liberty.edu/cmt)
Ben Gutierrez is Administrative Dean for Undergraduate Programs at Liberty University, a private Christian university located in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Here is the quote from their book:
John Ankerberg illustrates eternity by comparing it to the efforts of a parakeet to move sand!. Let's say you commanded a parakeet to pick up a single grain of sand in its beak, fly to the moon, and drop it off. Let's say it takes one million years for the parakeet to get to the moon. He puts the grain of sand down and flies back to earth. It takes a million years for him to get back. Let's say that the little bird systematically transferred one grain at a time all the sand from the beaches and deserts of all the earth until there was not even one grain of sand left on the earth. If you could add up all of the millions of years it had taken to remove all of the sand from all of those places, eternity would just be beginning.'
Eternity is a long time. Live for God. As you serve the Lord, you are making investments that will last forever. Therefore, don't give up! If you could only see it from God's point of view, you would know that ministry will be worth it all.
So the real source of the illustration is John Ankerberg. He may sound familiar to some of you.
From Wikipedia:
John Ankerberg (born December 10, 1945) is an American Christian evangelist and TV presenter. He is an ordained minister and has written 91 books focusing on religious subjects. He is the producer and host of the nationally televised weekly half-hour program The John Ankerberg Show.
If you're like me, you've watched just about everything on YouTube relating to Jehovah's Witnesses. If you've dug deeply enough into YouTube, you've come across the name John Ankerberg.
John Ankerberg has done several documentary shows that are highly critical of Jehovah's Witnesses. His documentaries call Jehovah's Witnesses's teaching "false" and unchristian. He has done shows where he interviews apostates, and on at least one of his shows, he even plays clips of Ray Franz speaking critically of the watchtower.
Just go to YouTube and enter "John Ankerberg Jehovah's Witnesses" and you'll have your choice of several anti-JW videos.
So... putting all of this together:
Governing Body member Stephen Lett gave a talk in which he illustrated the concept of "forever" by using a parakeet carrying a grain of sand in its beak. Lett changed the illustration to have the parakeet bringing the sand to the Grand Canyon. But the illustration orginated with John Ankerberg, someone who has been outspokenly critical of the Watchtower and Jehovah's Witnesses and who made programs that featured apostates speaking against the Watchtower.
So... where did Lett get the illustration? Did he read the book by Earley and Gutierrez? Surely if that's where he saw it, he would have recognized the name "John Ankerberg." Or did Lett get it from watching, reading, or listening to Ankerberg himself? Or did Lett just hear it thirdhand from someone else, without knowing that it originated with Ankerberg?
In any case, the fact that Governing Body member Stephen Lett is using illustrations that originated with an evangelist who is openly critical of the Watchtower and is a friend of apostates... to me, this tells me a lot about the way the Governing Body works. They lead their members to believe that they are receiving their information directly from God himself, via holy spirit. But in reality, they're just borrowing material from whatever religious sources they can find.
For anyone who wants to watch Lett's talk, it's here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlQDbkVoEfk&feature=youtube_gdata_player
The Ankerberg/parakeet illustration is in the last two or three minutes of the talk.
