My Plastic Toy Gorilla

When Rehoboam came to Jerusalem, he assembled the house of Judah and Benjamin, 180,000 chosen warriors, to fight against Israel, to restore the kingdom to Rehoboam. 2 Chronicles 11:1

When I was a kid, we visited the Chicago Zoo, where I got a plastic toy gorilla from one of those Mold-A-Rama machines that injects melted plastic into a mold while you watch. My memory is that when the animal (I got the gorilla) came out, you had a few seconds to reshape the cooling toy into whatever pose you wanted. So, years later, as an adult, when we encountered one of these machines, I had to show my family. My family was dubious about the reshaping part as the instructions on the machine said nothing about that. They even had the audacity to argue with me, so when my new toy gorilla came out, I had to show them how it could be reshaped . . . and promptly broke its arm off. At that point, I should have admitted I was wrong. The gorilla obviously wasn’t meant to be reshaped. Did I admit defeat though? No, instead, I doubled down, insisting that my toy was defective. Or maybe they changed the machine over the years?

Once we realize we’re wrong, the most appropriate course of action is to humbly admit it. For most of us though, this simply isn’t natural. For most of us, our first and most natural impulse is to dig in our proverbial heels, compounding our failure. This was King Rehoboam’s response in today’s passage. In the story, Rehoboam had just split Israel in two with a foolish, prideful refusal to decrease his taxation of his people. At the split, Rehoboam should have recognized his catastrophic miscalculation, abandoned his ridiculous tax rate, and attempted to reunite the kingdom. Instead of reconciliation though, Rehoboam went home, gathered his armies, and prepared to make war on his own people. For Rehoboam, killing his own brothers was preferable to admitting failure.

As I said, humbly admitting we’re wrong simply isn’t natural for most of us. And nowhere do we dig our heels in more than at home, with those whom we’re supposed to love the most. It is with our spouses and our children that we should act the best, but instead of our best behavior, our loved ones often get our worst.

I don’t want this to be the case in my home though, so daily, I must choose to put on humility. If I don’t purposefully choose humility, then I naturally embrace pride, making things worse. Unlike that toy gorilla though, I’d like to think that I can be reshaped and that I can learn from my mistakes . . . instead of compounding them.