Get The Monkey Off Your Back
As a pastor, I belong to what an influential school of sociology classifies as one of the “helping professions.” Along with teachers, counselors, advocates, therapists, social workers, nurses and myriad others, those of us in the “helping professions” work directly with people who are often in dire straits. Our work requires deep compassion, consistent empathy, and enormous energy.
These requirements help explain why the “helping professions” are so challenging, go perennially understaffed, and why those who work in them often suffer burnout. I frequently advise young preachers to take my Father’s advice. Given my profession’ love for fried chicken, my father used to say that if he was a chicken and spied a group of preachers anywhere in his vicinity, he would run in the opposite direction O ye would-be helping professional. RUN!! LOL.
All jokes aside, I strongly discourage anyone to do this kind of work unless they are feel called of God. Without a deep and abiding conviction about the divine origin and purpose of helping others, you will not last. More than 300,000 teachers quit each year. Nearly 18% of nurses quit after the first year. And one study found that 250 Pastors resign from their churches each month. Thousands more quit, but don’t leave their jobs. They exist as mere shadows of their former selves, and have lost their passion for everything except the paycheck. Burnout among those in the helping professions is commonplace. It is not an exaggeration to say that those who work in the helping professions need help.
In one of his recent blogs, the author James Clear shared a poignant observation that forced me to admit that part of the problem with those of us in the helping professions is well, us. One of my mentors used to say that we have found the enemy—and it is us. Many of us who help others are often our own worse enemy. Clear poignantly observed that
If someone is acting like an idiot, you can just move on and let them be wrong. You do not have a personal obligation to correct people who are committed to being stupid. Sure, sometimes you need to attempt to get on the same page, but usually you can simply reclaim your time and move on to more productive ventures.
Far too many of us in the helping professions feel an unhealthy obligation to help people who are committed to being idiots. I have discovered that entirely too often, the people who need the most help are the most resistant to receiving it. It is extremely difficult allow people to remain wrong, ignorant, poor, and less than what God wants them to be. But I think that more of us who spend our lives trying to help others would be much better served if we realized that we may be carrying a burden that God never intended us to carry. It may be time to get that monkey off our back.
That phrase “get the monkey off your back” traces its origin to one of Aesop’s fables in which a Dolphin helps transports a monkey to safety during a shipwreck, mistakenly assuming that the monkey was a man. When the dolphin discovers the true identity of his passenger, he dives deeper into the water to allow the monkey to take care of himself. Monkeys can swim. Not all human beings can. So the dolphin ditched the monkey to go help somebody who really needed and wanted help.
You do not have to be a professional helper to be unwisely shouldering the obligations, responsibilities, or decisions of others. All of us find ourselves in situations and in relationships where people are attempting to make us shoulder a false burden.
The conversation that Rachel had with her husband Jacob in Genesis 30:1-2 is a case in point. Rachel was the love of Jacob’s life. Jacob loved Rachel so much that he worked for her father Laban for 14 years to earn her hand in marriage. Rachel was beautiful. But Rachel was also barren. And for a woman to be barren in an society where the economy is based on agriculture was tantamount to being cursed. No amount of beauty could compensate for the inability to bear children. Clearly frustrated, Rachel confronts Jacob with these astonishing words:
When Rachel realized that she wasn’t having any children for Jacob….She told Jacob, “Give me sons or I’ll die!”
But Jacob’s response is instructive:
Jacob got angry with Rachel and said, “Am I God? Am I the one who refused you babies?”
Jacob hit the nail on the head. “I’m not God.” Jacob refused either to see himself or to allow himself to be seen as the guarantor of life, the ultimate arbiter or the first or final cause. It is as if he saying to his wife, “Listen. I may play a part in the baby making business, but I do not play the only part or even the most important part. I am not God!” Jacob refused to entertain the notion that he was in any way responsible for Rachel’s inability to bear children. He refused to walk around with that monkey on his back.
News alert: no matter how intelligent, successful, gifted, committed, or credentialed you are, you are not God. All of us can help. But none of us can save anyone. And we can’t even help those who don’t want to be helped.
Some wife, mother, husband, father, aunt, teacher, nurse, friend, uncle, auntie, or Pastor needs to stop walking around with other people’s problems on their backs.
You’ll serve better, live longer, and laugh more. Ditch ‘dem monkeys!