(This story is taken from a
fantastic biography about Brother Andrew, called The Narrow Road)
They were wonderful weeks that followed, weeks of
reading the Bible together, on opposite sides of the earth. I filled page after
page with questions, and Thile went to her pastor and her library and the depths
of her own heart to find the answers.
But as the months passed in the hospital, as my cast
came off bit by bit, and I saw the ugly shrunken leg and remembered the joys of
running that would never be mine again, I found myself holding on to a hard core
of resentment, which was just the opposite of the joy Thile and my Franciscan
nuns were talking about.
As soon as I was ambulatory, I started leaving the
hospital every evening after dinner to hobble painfully to the nearest pub and
drink myself into oblivion. The nuns never spoke about it. At least not
directly. But on the day before I was to be shipped home my favorite nun, Sister
Patrice, pulled a chair up to my bed.
"Andy, I have a story to tell you. Do you know how
natives catch monkeys out in the forest?"
My face lit up at the thought of a monkey story. "No.
Tell me." "Well, you see, the natives know that a monkey will never let go of
something he wants even if it means losing his freedom. So here's what they do.
They take a coconut and make a hole in one end just big enough for a monkey's
paw to slip through. Then they drop a pebble into the hole and wait in the
bushes with a net.
"Sooner or later a curious old fellow will come along.
He'll pick up that coconut shell and rattle it. He'll peer inside. And then at
last he'll slip his paw into the hole and feel around until he gets hold of that
pebble. But when he tries to bring it out, he finds that he cannot get the paw
through the hole without letting go. And, Andy, that monkey will never let go of
what he thinks is a prize. It's the easiest thing in the world to catch a fellow
who acts like that."
Sister Patrice got up and put the chair back by the
table. She paused for a moment and looked me straight in the eye.
"Are you holding on to something, Andrew? Something
that's keeping you from your freedom?"
And then she was gone.
I knew perfectly well what she meant. I also knew her
sermon wasn't for me. The next day was going to be a great one on two counts: it
was my twenty-first birthday, and it was the day the hospital ship sailed for
home. To celebrate, I called together all survivors who could still walk or limp
of the company I had come to Indonesia with three years earlier. There were
eight of us. We had a grand time. We got roaring, shouting, belligerently
drunk...
A fragile little event occurred that changed my life
far more radically than the bullet that had torn through bone and muscle a year
before. It was a stormy night in the dead of winter, 1950. I was in bed. The
sleet blew across the polders as it can only blow in Holland in mid-January. I
pulled the covers higher under my chin, knowing that outside the sleet was
driving almost parallel to the ground. There were many voices in that wind. I
heard Sister Patrice. "The monkey will never let go. . . ." I heard the singing
under the big tent. "Let my people go. . . ."
What was it I was hanging on to? What was it that was
hanging on to me? What was standing between me and freedom? The rest of the
house was asleep. I lay on my back with my hands under my head staring at the
darkened ceiling and all at once, very quietly I let go of my ego. With a new
note in the wind yelling at me not to be a fool, I turned myself over to God
lock, stock, and adventure. There wasn't much faith in my prayer. I just said,
"Lord, if You will show me the way I will follow You. Amen."
It was as simple as that.
Open Doors, Brother Andrew with John & Elizabeth
Sherrill, The Narrow Road, Grand Rapids, MI: Fleming H. Revell, 2001, p. 56,57
and 69.
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