| Sunny Side Up May 21, 2003 �2003, Kathleen Gibson Mice and men and faith We'd only lived in our first apartment a few months when I noticed something. "A mouse visits our oven drawer at night," I told the Preacher. He snorted. "What would a mouse be doing on the second floor of a new apartment?" "Looking for food, like his cousins on the ground, I s'pose. It's true-there really is a mouse." He wouldn't believe me, so one night I sprinkled flour on the drawer bottom. The next morning pawprints decorated the entire surface. Even the Preacher couldn't deny it. A mouse had indeed visited our oven drawer. The landlord promptly evicted him-the mouse, that is, not the husband. In one of our homes, a mouse robbed wool from the backs of two small sheep decorations in a storage cabinet. Then it built a nest beside their shorn figures. The sheep hadn't said baa, though I said plenty when I discovered it. We tackled that mouse ourselves, the Preacher and I. Spent an hour chasing it from room to room; he with the broom, I with the mop, until we were exhausted and giddy. We cornered the culprit at the closed door to the basement. The wee thing had given us such a gallant chase, it almost hurt to do it in. Almost, but not. I looked at Rick, he looked back; we counted to three and lunged. Stuck that critter to the door like a postage stamp to an envelope. (Animal lovers, please don't write-we were under the influence of far too much adrenalin.) A few months ago, while dining at friends', a curious mouse emerged from beside the fridge and stood surveying our table. Casing out the menu for his late night crumb snack, no doubt. The man of the house set traps. Several weeks later his wife told us, with gleeful smirk, "Tom checked the trapline this morning. Got two." That reminded me of a story a friend told me. While attending university years back, he worked at the fur marketing board, sorting piles of stretched pelts brought in by trappers. One day he discovered, sandwiched between stacks of beaver and muskrat, two perfectly stretched furs of a different sort. "I suspect," he said with a grin, "that the trapper was bored." The pelts? Mice. "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley," poet Robbie Burns noted. Aye, and a truer thing 'twas ne'er uttered. Just ask Job, that guy with an Old Testament book named after him. Ask anyone who's experienced a sudden downturn in health or finances. A layoff. A car accident. A relationship breakdown. Sometimes life feels like a mouse chase, and the world a giant mousetrap. Have you noticed that Christians squeak just like the next mouse when the trap snaps shut? But some of them squeak praise. Insist, like Job, on ridiculously trusting God, no matter what. Strange, but most of those eventually land sunny-side-up, even in the frying pan. Guess there's something to this faith business after all. You can resond to this column at [email protected] |
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