A Story About Baby Elephants

Somebody told me an absolutely cracking story the other day. All credit and many thanks to Sam Brennan, who was that somebody, and has brought the brilliance of this story into my life. It goes like this…

A man is being shown around backstage at an old circus. The trainer shows him where the elephants are standing around, chains round their ankles holding them to posts in the ground.
“Wow!” says the man, “they seem very calm, do they not mind being chained up like that?”
“Oh they don’t like it,” replied the trainer, “they don’t like it at all.”
“Well in that case, why aren’t they struggling? Are the chains too strong for them? Have they given up?”
“Actually, the chains are not too strong for them at all. These are 4 ton elephants. They could snap those things easily. Even if they couldn’t, to be honest if they tried they could pull the whole post out of the ground!”
“What? Then why don’t they?”
“They have been in these chains since they were very young. When they were just babies they used to try to run away and break the chains, but they weren’t strong enough. So they stopped trying. And now, they just don’t try.”

I love that story. Not because it makes me happy to think about chained up elephants obviously – it’s pretty tragic in it’s own way – but because I think it’s so true. Everyone was laughing at me after Sam told it the other night because I was doing such a massive wide-eyes ‘oh-that’s-such-a-good-story’ face! So here’s a couple of things it makes me think.

One: We Don’t Know Now So We Assume We Can’t Know Ever.

I think there are a lot of people in the world today who are convinced that we can’t really know the answers to the big questions. That we can’t really discover any proper truth about who we are or what the world is or what we’re supposed to do with our lives. So for a lot of people the best we can do is 1) guess, 2) not overcommit, and 3) try to get along. And that’s a decent start I’ll grant – better than 1) guess, 2) kill everyone that guessed differently – but what if that’s settling for much less than we’re capable of? What if that’s just standing around thinking the chains are too strong for us when really we could be free? What I mean is: when was the last time most people really tried to investigate the answers to the big questions? To be honest I think a lot of us feel like we’re too busy to think about, read about, or talk about the meaning of life. And when you think about it that seems a little bit silly. And I honestly believe that we can know the answers, that we can discover who we are and what we’re living for – I believe that the chains are not too strong for us. So let’s give ‘em a go, surely? *

Two: We Think We’ll Always Be Normal, When God Can Make Us Wonderful.

I think a lot of Christians end up like the elephants in a different way, stuck where we are when we could so definitely be free. We have somehow been led to believe that while God is capable of creating the universe, inventing the supernova and the crafting the kiwi-fruit; capable of turning water into wine, giving sight to the blind, and raising Jesus from the dead; he is mysteriously not capable of changing who we are. That’s not true. He is able – not just that but he is ready and eager – to transform us completely. To take us, little problematic people that we are, and make us well-springs, volcanoes, where the unlimited, unimaginable love and light and goodness of God erupts into the world. He is able to deal with – and by deal with I mean deal with and be done with – our fears, our insecurities, our failures, the things about us that hurt people, the things about us that hurt ourselves. He’s a 4 ton elephant and he can break us out of whatever trap we’re in, whatever cycle, whether that’s really nasty dark stuff or whether it’s just feeling uninteresting and unimportant. All we’ve got to do is ask him, get his help, press into him, and trust him. I hope this doesn’t sound too much just like fancy words, because I really believe it’s true – it’s not always easy or painless but it is true. You may think that you’re a little baby elephant and the chains are too strong – but the biggest elephant in the world put your chain round his ankle just to be with you, and if you’ll let him, he can uproot everything that ties you down. Seriously – he can uproot galaxies.

But the elephants just stopped trying. And they never knew what it felt like to be free.

*The big reason that I think we can know is in the video I made at Christmas, it’s on the blog here in December, called ‘Yuri the Spaceman and Hamlet the Prince’!

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