Come and get this donkey out of the mud!
Yes, it seems there is no end to the proverbs featuring donkeys in our Central Asian language. Here’s yet another one. The meaning of this proverb is similar to the Google/Oxford definition of that smelly and colorful American idiom, dumpster fire, “a chaotic or disastrously mishandled situation.”
Let’s say that someone has mismanaged things so badly that it seems there’s no solution to be found. That’s when you pull this proverb out.
There are daily household applications for this kind of a proverb, such as when questioning one child tattling about getting slapped in the face by a dirty sock leads back to the fact that they had just hit their sister, which then leads back to yet another sibling’s sin, which then leads to collective sin and foolishness against what all the offspring had been asked to do by their parents in the first place. Where does the discerning parent start when it’s general donkey dumpster fire behavior all around?
Then there are times in ministry when you are faced with situations so convoluted by sin and foolishness that it boggles the mind how one person could ever create such a tangled, knotted mess. Here I recall a season early on in marriage when we were invited to move into the upstairs of a family from our church for the sake of life-on-life community. Shortly after moving in and starting a new community group with this family, one that was full of messy new believers with their own needs of intensive care, it emerged that the father of the household where we were newly living had been regularly committing adultery with another Christian woman from the same neighborhood – a woman whose husband was known for his love of guns. The fallout and damage control required for this situation was its own kind of baptism by fire for me as a 24-year-old brand-new community group leader. It might someday merit a post of its own, if I can ever figure out how to tell the story. At least it can serve here as a fitting illustration for what it looks like to try to get the proverbial donkey out of the neck-deep mud at a local church level.
On the macro level, the political and ethnic situation of our entire region at large can often feel like this. Basically, every group has committed genocide against everyone else at some point, stolen each other’s land, oppressed one another, and then themselves gone on to suffer the same things. What does justice look like when everyone and their ancestors have everyone else’s and everyone else’s ancestors’ blood on their hands?
As we heard preached in the local language this past week, God’s word acknowledges the universality of these kinds of dumpster fires and braying donkeys stuck fast in the mud. The preacher of Ecclesiastes 7 concludes that section with this sober dose of realism, “This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but they have gone in search of many schemes” (Ecc 7:29). Alas, we fallen humans have a remarkable capacity to take God’s good gifts and to twist them into the most unbelievable messes.
As believers, we know that no mess is so intractable that God’s perfect grace and justice can’t eventually untangle and remake it, both now and in the coming resurrection. There is a real, if heavy, hope in that. This means we can confidently get down in the mud and begin digging. But we are right to lament the mess at the same time.
Thankfully, as is so often the case in Central, there’s a proverb for that.
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Photo from Wilkimedia Commons.
Entrusted to the Dirt 
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