Thursday's are generally the days that I get to chill out and stay at home. Of course, home is sometimes busier than the office is...with 2 boys running around the house while the oldest one is at school. Anyways, yesterday I was at home and Brandston (my 3 year old) wanted to play a game. So out came a game we hadn't played in a few months - Tumblin' Monkeys!
Now, I don't know how many of you have ever had the great honour of playing this incredible game...but if you haven't, I'd advise you to hit up your local Toy's R Us or Wal-Mart right after you finish reading.
It's a simple game, really. You have a hollow tree with different coloured sticks going through it, and at the top sits your primate pets (monkeys, duh!). You roll a coloured dice and then you have to pull a stick that's the same colour that you rolled. Of course, there are few game rules designed to make the fun more fair. The most important rule is to pull the highest sticks on the tree and then work your way down. Everyone takes turns until all the monkeys have fallen to the bottom of the tree (those coloured sticks are what keep the primates at the top), and the person with the LEAST amount of monkeys at the end of the game wins. Poor Brandston has this part mixed up, but I don't mind winning so please nobody tell him that he has it backwards!
While I was playing yesterday, this thought just hit me. Life is kinda like a game of Tumblin' Monkeys sometimes. We are like trees (Psalm 1:3 / John 15:5), and all those coloured sticks are like our foundation, our substance, our character. When everything in our lives is at it should be, there aren't any monkeys around. But sometimes, one stick at a time, we let our foundation...our character, get weakened. Sometimes one monkey falls all the way down and sometimes it doesn't. We get to thinking that everything's okay, not realizing that we are on the verge of this enormous pile of monkeys crashing to the ground.
Monkeys are those issues of life. A monkey is when bad decisions come home to roost. In other words, a monkey isn't a pet...it's "Bad News Bruce". But when you start to mess with your foundation, after a while, things will start to crumble and fall apart.
So remember that your character, your substance, your foundation is...EVERYTHING!
And as for me...I'll keep beating Brandston at Tumblin' Monkeys...it's like taking candy away from a baby...
Posted on
Fri, October 10, 2008
by Garrett Johnson