Monkeys throw poop

If you have ever taken your young children to the zoo, you’ll know exactly where I am going with this. Kids always love to go see the monkeys. One only needs to refuse to go to that area of the zoo with the kids to get to observe ugliness you never imagined possible in your kid. Hey, monkeys are fun to watch. They are always busy doing something, they are typically active and entertaining. But, and yes, it’s a big but, one must be prepared to see spontaneous acts of off-limits behavior (well, certainly for humans that is) like picking their butts and masturbating. If that’s not bad enough, they also throw poop. Their own poop. And any other monkey’s poop. And while they are no Sandy Koufax’s, they nonetheless can toss some rather good fast balls, er, fast poops.

While listening to a Christian radio station this morning, I was enjoying the topic of conversation—fear and overcoming it. As you might imagine, the call-ins were robust. There was story after story of fear that folks faced, what it did to them, and how they overcame it. It was a great biblically based couple of hours on the topic.

Toward the end, the host shared one of his stories about himself in his younger days when in college. The long and short of it was that he was all but paralyzed with fear on an on-going basis and couldn’t seem to shake it. He ultimately met with a campus Christian psychologist. He shared that after he addressed his concerns with the gentleman, the psychologist looked at him, pausing for a moment, and then shared three words with him as his response; “Monkeys throw poop”. That was golden! That was sage advice.

You see, in truth, throughout our lives we will be pooped on, and most often we never see it coming—just as when we are visiting the monkey cages at the zoo. We need to know that it will happen, that we can expect it to happen, and that we can get messed up by it. That’s simply life. We can thank that first couple in Eden for that. But throughout the Bible we are told repeatedly, 365 times to be exact, that “I am always with you” (including other similar wordings). God is always with us. And when the monkey throws poop we have the choice of either fearing, or having faith in that God who is always with us.