Quick recap of the story of when a British company designed and built a golf course in Calcutta, India. However, there was a problem – monkey’s surrounded the golf course – there is confusion about the appeal but whatever it was about the game of golf, these monkeys really enjoyed both watching and taking part in the game of golf. So when one of the golfers took a swing and knocked the ball into the Fairway, these monkeys would run along, grab the ball, and start throwing it around.
Obviously, the golfers didn’t like this, so they tried doing a few different things to solve the problem.
The first thing that they did to try to control this situation was to build high fences around the golf course – not such a great idea considering it’s was monkeys that they were trying to keep out!
Not surprisingly – the monkeys just climbed the fences and carried on with their game.
The next thing they tried to do was to lure the monkeys away from the golf course but the number of monkeys made this a no-win proposition. The same failure occured when the plan shifted to capturing the monkeys, for everyone they managed to capture there seemed to be a dozen to take its place.
The British finally acknowledged that they couldn’t solve the problem and decided that they had to bring about an innovation – and the innovation was a ground rule that said – ‘We play the ball wherever the monkey drops it.
As you can imagine, playing this way could be rather frustrating. For example, the ball is driven well down the fairway close to the hole – only to have a monkey run off with it and drop it somewhere far from the hole. On the other hand, the opposite sometimes happened. A terrible shot might be picked up and delivered close to the cup. It didn’t take long before golfers realized that golf on that particular course was quite similar to our experience of life – there are good breaks and there are bad breaks and we cannot entirely control the outcome of the game called life.
Like it or not, life can resemble this scenario about this golf course, life for most of us is going to consist of a sequence of ebb and flows, good times and bad, but very rarely does life align with our game plan.
We tee life up just the way we like it and make a good swing for success, and then things change; sickness, opposition, financial hardship, relational breakdown, betrayal, divorce or our own poor choices, and we find ourselves with a bad lie playing out of the rough.
In moments like that we must master the skill of playing the ball where life drops it! Pastor Chuck Swindoll has said that life is 10% what we make of it and 90% in how we respond to adversity. Which is similar to Step 1 in the 12 Step Program, reinforcing the fact that we are all broken and powerless to control our own destinies. Which is another way of remembering that Jesus went out of His way to find those who were powerless, both physically and perhaps most of all, spiritually.
And if you are not familiar with the stories of Jesus, I encourage you to start by reading Luke 7:36-50.
