The Hand-Snatch Game

I love playing games with my kids. It’s probably my all-time favorite thing to do ever.

There’s one little game I play with my kids almost on a weekly basis. I call it the “Hand-Snatch Game.” I’m sure there’s another name for it and I’m sure I’m not the only Dad who’s ever played it, but the game is fairly simple.

The game is played when I’m in a situation sitting next to my children, most commonly in church. Usually I have a kid sitting next to me and they’ll reach to hold my hand, but instead I snatch their hand tightly and apply gentle pressure until they’re able to pull it free. Then I open my hand, palm up, and wait for them to reach their hand again. They’ll inch their hand near again, watching for my hand to snatch, and pull back at the slightest movement of my fingers, not wanting to get caught in my grip again.

An interesting thing happens whenever I play this game. If I jolt to snatch as soon as they start to come near, they pull back immediately and don’t even get close. But if I wait… if I don’t even flinch my fingers… they’ll come closer and closer, slowly, until they are just touching my palm. And if I still wait, they will eventually put their entire hand in mine. Sometimes they’ll even look up at me and wonder if I’m still playing the game. And in that moment, my hand quickly snatches around theirs, and I get them every time.

There’s other games we play where I follow a similar pattern, like when I pretend to be a sleeping monster. The behavior from my kids is the same. They’ll creep closer and closer to me, start poking me gently, cautiously, and they’ll even start laying or jumping on my back. Then, in a moment they least expect it, I’ll shoot up from the ground, grab them by their ankles and hold on tight as they scream and try to get away.

What I’ve learned as the hand-snatcher or the sleeping monster is that if I can just wait patiently until their guard is down, until their fear of capture decreased, or perhaps until they’ve even thought I’ve stopped playing the game at all, I will increase my chances of successful capture.

It’s a fun harmless little game I enjoy playing with the kids, but it provides a simple reminder for me about the importance of not getting complacent. Of not letting your guard down.

I’ll share two experiences I had as a brand new missionary that illustrate my personal experience with this idea:

Mission Story #1

Eighteen years ago, I served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Ecuador, Guayaquil South Mission. After arriving in Ecuador to the mission office, I was sent the next day to a small town, 9 hours inland, called Catamayo. When I say small town, I mean you could walk across this town in about 15-20 minutes, something I did on nearly a daily basis. As a new gringo who barely spoke Spanish, I was trained by a wonderful missionary companion from Central America who didn’t speak any English. There was nobody within many many miles that I could really communicate with. But he was very patient with me, and with his help I quickly learned essential language communication skills and missionary training materials.

My companion was very diligent in making sure that I spent the time I needed for study, memorization, language, developing all the skills I needed for success. My companion also loved buying movies. And in this little town of Catamayo (and really, everywhere in Ecuador) there are pirated movie stands on every street corner. We’d be walking back to the apartment for the day and we would always stop for him to buy some $2 DVD’s. He was collecting some of his favorite movies to take home with him. Since we were companions, and I had to be with him 100% of the time, I would go and wait. Eventually I would go check out movies with him. Soon I started finding movies I liked as well, and I ended up buying some for myself. Nothing wrong with that, just buying movies to take home at the end of my mission.

My companion carried with him a little DVD player that we would use as part of missionary lessons with people we would talk to. We loved playing little movies about Jesus or the Restoration that we carried with us, it was engaging and entertaining for anyone interested in the message we had to share.

My companion felt the need to start “testing” some of the DVD’s he had bought to make sure they worked. So several times during any given week, he would take me to the little church where we met as a branch on Sundays and send me to a classroom by myself to study and practice my language and missionary skills, while he would pull out the TV in the other room, plug in his DVD player, and “test” his movies. I was perhaps naive to think he was really just testing them, but I tried to just focus on my studies. The amount of time we started spending at the church increased and increased. For hours sometimes, I would be studying while he was watching his movies.

After several weeks of this, I had finished up my study goals (there were little certificates and landmarks I had to surpass with memorization and language skills) so there was no need for us to spend as much time at the church during the week anymore, but we were still doing it. You can guess where this is going, eventually we found ourselves just watching movies in a room of the church building. Although I did not feel comfortable doing something that was clearly against mission rules, I felt too afraid to confront my companion. I was new, inexperienced, and weak. I wanted to get out there and do missionary work, but I felt stunted.

What started as just buying movies on the way back to the apartment turned into watching several movies a week instead of proselyting.

Mission Story #2

I’ll share another experience with this same companion. He LOVED soccer (well, fútbol), as do most people in Central and South America, and as do I! Every Wednesday evening, the Catamayo branch and any friends in the town would all gather to play soccer behind the church building. However, like most missions, there are many rules that missionaries are obligated to follow, many of them up to the discretion of the Mission President. One of those rules was we were not allowed to play soccer with members or investigators. I knew this, but my wonderful companion decided it was a rule he had no interest in following, and justified it as a good opportunity to invite potential investigators and interact with them. Again, he’s my companion so I went where he went and although at first I resisted the urge to play and would just watch, eventually I ended up right along side him playing soccer every Wednesday night.

One night we were playing and the ball was accidentally kicked over the fence that surrounded the church property. It landed on top of the tile roof of one of the neighbors houses. Being a young, active, and eager to help missionary, I volunteered myself to go up and retrieve it. It was almost 9:00 at night and quite dark and I climbed over the fence and up onto the roof.

Now, I’m from Alaska, and I’d been on plenty of roofs in my life thus far, but never a tile one. So I was very unfamiliar with how unstable and brittle these clay tile shingles could be. I walked as carefully as I could to where the ball lay, and right as I was reaching down to pick it up…

I fell through the roof. Right into someone’s house.

Thankfully nobody was directly below me. But the family whose house I just fell into was sitting close by at their kitchen table, and I scared the living daylights out of them.

Instead of getting upset, they immediately came over and started asking if I was alright, still somewhat in shock that a gringo just fell through their ceiling. Other than a sprained ankle, I told them in broken spanish that I was okay. Through the open front door, I saw my companion's frantic face rushing towards me. I could tell by looking at him that he felt responsible and guilty for what had happened. I hobbled out of their home, apolgizing and embarrased, unsure of how to repair the damage I'd just caused.

That was the last night we ever played soccer at the church building. Interestingly enough, we also never went to watch movies at the church again for the rest of the time he was my companion.

He was transferred soon after and I remained in Catamayo with an American companion, but for the rest of his mission whenever I saw him, we would chuckle about me falling through someone's ceiling. We had even tried to teach a missionary lesson to the family whose roof I fell through, thinking it would have been quite a unique story had they decided to join the church. They could have told their kids and fellow church members that they heard the message of the gospel from a missionary who fell from the sky into their home. Maybe some day I'll go back to Catamayo and see what's become of them.

Ambush Predators

Nature is full of predators and prey. We've all watched a video perhaps in school or on the Discovery channel, of a lion or a cheetah chasing down their prey. Eventually with speed and strategy, they capture their prey. But another type of predator we maybe don't see as much are ambush predators. Ambush predators are usually carnivores that capture their prey by stealth, luring their prey and using the element of surprise. Ambush predators don't have to bother with speed or fatigue, they just have a tremendous amount of patience and wait and wait and wait before launching a sudden overwhelming attack that quickly incapacitates and captures their prey. It's a highly effective strategy and to me, even more intriguing.

Now, I shared those stories from my mission to illustrate the message of what can happen when we find ourselves inching closer and closer to what we know to be a wrong choice. Just like my kids in the hand-snatch game. If they keep their distance, they're safe and I'll never get them. And from that distance, we can say to that choice "you're so far away, I'll never even come close." But then we find ourselves making small compromises, small adjustments in the wrong direction, justifiying and making excuses along the way, and before we know it, we've arrived at the choice we claimed we'd never have to make. And it reacts. It snatches us. It might even wait until we feel quite comfortable as we snuggle up right against it, then it closes in on us.

In reality, it's not the choice that does this, it's the consequence of the choices we made to get there. We can control our choices, but we can't control the consequences.

Now I had a wonderful missionary campanion, and many others after him, who all made their own choices about how to serve as a missionary. But regardless of whatever choices they made, I also made my own choices. I also suffered the consequences of those choices. And not just as a missionary, obviously, but throughout my entire life.

It seems to be human nature to test the boundaries of complacency by inching closer and closer to a known danger convincing ourselves we won’t get harmed. Whether that’s physical, spiritual, emotional or mental harm, we seem to be quick to forget the consequences of wrong choices or the severity of the grip that awaits us when we get snatched.

I remind myself when I play the hand-snatch game or the monster game with my kids, that the best strategy to avoid the consequences of those games is just to steer clear. Right? To keep my distance. To not compromise or justify. So why don't my kids do it?

Well, partly because it's just a fun and silly game with dad. No real harm is going to come to them.

But also because that's not reality. I'm going to slip up. I'm going to give into temptation. Everybody does. Sometimes the game is just too enticing.

And it's what I do after that that really matters. Hopefully, I learn. Hopefully, I grow.

And hopefully, I have the strength to pull my hand back out after it gets snatched.