How to Catch a Monkey

Sometimes my English students help me carry supplies from my car to our classroom in the church. Last year, a new student tried to help me with a bag that I was carrying. Actually, I had two bags on that arm, both looped over my wrist. In the same hand I had my keys ready to unlock the church, and something in my other hand as well.

So it was no easy task for my student to extract the bag from my arm. In fact, the bag that he happened to grab was looped under the other, and my closed hand was making it impossible for him to remove. We had a momentary tug-of-war. I couldn’t explain what the problem was. I didn’t want to drop my keys. He was determined to help.

There have been countless times during my work in this ministry when I have experienced awkward moments. I don’t know if it makes any sense, but it just seems that there is so much more opportunity to look like an idiot when you are attempting to communicate across language and culture barriers. Or, maybe it’s just me.

Whatever the case, I am slowly getting used to it. I have begun to feel God’s presence more distinctly in these moments. And the awkwardness is becoming more instructive than destructive for me. It is in the awkward moments that I am faced with my true self. It is here that I am forced to laugh or cry, to go on or to give up. It was at this particular moment, held captive by plastic bags, that I recalled a story I had heard about a technique hunters were using to catch monkeys.

It seems that if you place a desirable object in a clear glass jar in the jungle, a monkey will attempt to retrieve it. To catch the monkey, the jar needs to be heavier than the monkey is. It also needs to have a neck barely large enough for the monkey’s arm. Placed where he can see it, the monkey will soon attempt to get the object inside. It won’t take him long to realize he must reach into the jar through the neck. And in no time, he will grasp the object inside. But in so doing, he will have made a fist. And his fist, which is too large to fit back through the hole, essentially locks him to the jar. His desire to have the object holds him in place for hours. Even the approach of the hunters does not persuade the monkey to drop his prize and escape.

In the end, I laughed as I remembered the story and realized the only solution was to let go of my keys. My student and I managed to extract the bags from my arm. We survived the awkward moment. He has become one of my best students.

But it was through this event, and my struggle with this awkward moment that I was reminded of the profound truth in the monkey’s folly. We are so often held in place by those things we refuse to give up. Sometimes they are obvious things, like cars and houses. But sometimes they are hopes and dreams, or even anger and bitterness. Sometimes pride, as we allow ourselves to suffer awkward moments. It is in letting go that we become free.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.
Luke 18:22, 23

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Matthew 6:21

The Heart I Want to Have

I prayed for a man in a grocery store parking lot this morning. It wasn’t what I set off to do, wasn’t on my agenda. But it was, I think, a God-ordered event that has pushed me a little farther along the path He seems to be taking me.

I have been giving quite a lot of thought lately to the loving of the “unlovable”. For me, at this moment, this has been the homeless. We all have reasons why some people are harder for us to love than others. For me, it’s not the threat of violence or even so much the idea of being latched-onto and taken advantage of. It’s the physical dirtiness and genuine likelihood of disease that I struggle with.

I watched a video a few years ago on refugees in Romania. The commentator was saying that genocides often begin when one group of people begin to see another group of people as less-than-human. In Romania, they began with various restrictions upon a particular people group that eventually escalated into complete segregation of these people from the rest of society. They were literally locked into camps within the cities. Of course, they could no longer support themselves or contribute to society in any way. They had limited access to water and food, and consequently became all that others claimed them to be—dirty, desperate, dependant. This scenario was compared with the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. And of course, the Europeans did much the same thing with the Native Americans.

It’s not that I subscribe to the idea that homeless people have been forced into that position, or that they don’t own most of the responsibility for living the way that they do. But I do see the same spiral of destruction in their lives: that, once dirty, desperate and dependant, it is a practically hopeless pursuit to climb back out of that hole.

I have heard it said of Mother Teresa that she came to a moment of crisis—feeling God’s call upon her to care for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She said of a man on the street that she knew if she didn’t help this person, she wouldn’t help anyone. She helped him.
Jonah, too, faced a crisis when asked to go to the ones he despised:

Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me. ...Jonah 1:2

Peter was given a command to go to the unclean accompanied by a vision:

He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”
The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” ...Acts 10:11-14 NIV

We know now that Peter’s struggle was not about food. He was being sent to an unclean people as an instrument of God’s grace and mercy. Peter was being sent to the very people that he had taken diligent care to avoid his entire life.

Why does God do this? Why does he ask us to serve those we find it most difficult to love? Perhaps it is because, while we (humans) may find some people more or less loveable, God finds us all pretty dirty, desperate and dependant. Somehow, He loves us beyond our condition. He loves us in a better way, with a gracious, overlooking-what-we-have-become kind of love. He remembers us from the garden, I suppose, and sees in us what He created us to be. And this, I think, is how I need to see others. Not so much according to their condition as to who they are, who they were meant to be in Christ.

I know it’s not much in the scope of the whole world, but for me, this small step to pray publicly with a man who had simply approached me for money was an uncomfortably positive step forward. I’m sure that prayer was the last thing this man expected or wanted, but I hope that God will apply it to his soul nonetheless. As for me, I am a little closer to having the heart I want to have. And a little more thankful to God for loving me beyond my present condition.