The Teacher Shares about a Trip to the Zoo (Translating the Gospels, part 1)

by Matt Mikalatos

This is the first in a four-part series of posts re-telling a familiar Gospel story in an unfamiliar way. Here’s an introductory post explaining the whys and wherefores of the series. I’m looking forward to your comments on the series.

The teacher smells of stale cigarettes. The stench of spilled booze and musk and marijuana clings to him with an apologetic shrug, as if the alcoholics and tweakers and whores and johns don’t know any better but the air around him does. When the fresh-faced, fresh-scrubbed, freshly dressed church people come awkwardly into the room, like children into a haunted house, startled and scared and disbelieving, the question they always ask, without thinking or remorse is, “Why?” Why are you spending time with these people? Why aren’t you bricking them off in their section of the town, why aren’t you staring past them on the sidewalk and hoping for the walk signal, why aren’t you locking the car door and trying not to make eye contact?

“Because of Andy Johnson,” he says, and he pulls his tangled hair out of his eyes. “Andy was a second grade teacher in downtown Los Angeles. The poverty of Andy’s students made a pit in his stomach, and he thought of them almost as his own children, although he didn’t have any. Which was okay, because some of them didn’t have a father, anyway.

“Andy worked hard to give those kids some fond, Technicolor memories, so that as adults they could think back on their childhoods without nightmares. One year, he hatched a plan for a field trip to the San Diego zoo, complete with pictures in front of the giraffes and taking home stuffed tigers and ice cream cones melting all over seven-year-old fingers.

“The school didn’t have the money budgeted, of course, and the children didn’t and Andy certainly didn’t, but he made phone calls and begged administrators and wrote politicians and cajoled zoo employees until he scraped together enough promises and permissions to fill a long yellow bus full of volunteers and second graders – not just his own class but every second grader in the school — and ride down to the best zoo in the world.

“He put them on the buddy system and assigned them to clusters of ten with an adult in each and he marched them proudly through the parking lot and past the ticket booths and then off to the polar bears. The kids laughed and one kid said what about the penguins and he said not yet, stick together, grab your buddy, stay with your partners.

“Over and over Andy counted the kids… 96… 97… 98… 99… 100. He kept them from climbing on fences, he snagged wanderers, he picked up little Selina when she turned her ankle and couldn’t keep up. He counted to a hundred at the giraffe enclosure, at the monkey environment, at the sea lion tank. He counted to a hundred more times than he would ever make his kids count it, and he smiled at the thought.

“At lunch he counted again, 96, 97, 98, 99. No number 100. He must have miscounted, maybe one of the kids had moved tables. He counted again, 97, 98, 99. His heart beat faster, his teeth clenched and his fingers pointed at each of them now, 97, 98, 99.  He put out the zero call to the kids, the sign for them to take their volume down to nothing and sit quietly, and when the children were sitting still with their half-eaten sandwiches and cracker bags in front of them he counted one more time.

“Roger Hom was missing. Roger. A good, well-behaved kid, but curious and Andy wasn’t surprised he had wandered, just surprised he had gotten away.

“So what did Andy do? A mathematician might shrug his shoulders and said, ‘Aw, what’s one kid more or less?’ He still had ninety-nine percent of his students, he should let that one percent go.

“No! Of course not, not Andy. He arranged the parents in a perimeter around the kids and he drew an imaginary circle around them and said, listen, if those kids cross this line… tell them to get back in line because this is public school and that’s all we have the authority to do. He raced back into the zoo and past the lions and the giraffes and monkeys and grabbed every person he saw and said have you seen this kid, seven years old, about this high, answers to Roger? He told the zoo staff and the parents and the passersby and he scoured every square inch of that zoo until finally he found Roger, safe and looking placidly at the penguins. Andy scooped him up into his arms and squeezed him so hard that Roger looked at him with a warm and happy confusion. Andy put Roger on his shoulders and marched him back to the rest of the class. When he came into view of the wall of parents, they let out a ragged cheer.” He clears his throat and takes a small sip from his water bottle.

“In the same way, there is more cheering in heaven about one lost child coming home than for the ninety-nine who stayed in the right place.”

About Matt Mikalatos
Matt works for  Campus Crusade, providing regional leadership to the Worldwide Student Network. He and his wife Krista, both graduates of Western Seminary, have ministered to people around the world. But they currently live in Portland, OR. Matt is the author of Imaginary Jesus and Night of the Living Dead Christian: One Man’s Ferociously Funny Quest to Discover What It Means to Be Truly Transformed. And you can also follow Matt’s unique blend of humor and insight over at his blog The Burning Hearts Revolution.