Late one night a few weeks ago the stillness was shattered by a high-pitched squeal coming from my roommate’s room. I wasn’t sure quite what to make of it, especially since I’d never heard her emit that particular pitch before. I thought that perhaps she was excited by something she found online since she’s quite animated when it comes to things like Buckeye football and Glee. To be fair, that was before I found out about the mouse in her bedroom. Personally, I think mice are adorable when they’re in a pet store. When they are invading your home from the field out back they are, at best, a nuisance, and, at worst, a really nasty health issue. Sara, on the other hand, is terrified of them. That took me by surprise because she is hands down one of the bravest people I know. She kills all the spiders in the house, has held a tarantula, watches my boys once a week, and even teaches high school. I guess I just thought that she wasn’t scared by anything tangible.
As she stood in the doorway to the living room tossing nervous glances behind her, I heard God ask me, “How much do you think I can teach with one little mouse?” I turned my head to hide my smile because I’m not a nice person and, despite Sara’s predicament, God’s question amused me. I remember thinking something like, “God, that’s not nice.”
So far, we’ve disposed of three dead mice. Just when we think we’ve got them all, another one pops up in Sara’s room. Let me tell you, it’s getting old. The other night one of them even ventured into the living room (I guess the little guy likes So You Think You Can Dance). I don’t know what God’s teaching Sara with these furry little professors of panic, but in this fiasco I see an illustration of my own life.
One of my bad habits is something my husband calls ‘stuffing’. That is, when company comes over, I stuff things out of sight so that the house appears tidy. Closets are usually the first casualty of my vain-glorious version of house cleaning. I think that before this debacle the last time I cleaned out the closet in my front room was… January of 2007. It was so bad that no one was allowed to open it (yes, this was an actual house rule) lest someone get hurt by falling debris. When we saw a mouse run back there, I was horrified. Mice might not scare me like they scare Sara but the idea of having to clean that closet so that I could set traps for the mouse absolutely terrified me.
The next day, I pulled out the broken ceramic face mask, the bags of left over Mardi Gras beads, the purple carnival masks, three different backpacks, two mismatched gloves, an entire feather bed (stuffed into the bottom of the closet), two boxes of homeschooling material my mother gave me, a ceramic plate (somehow unscathed), several candles and boxes of chem sticks, Christmas presents for boys, hats, broken hangers, a chess set, a Singer sewing machine, a fold-out sewing board, two bowling balls, an old collection of toy airplanes, 4,837 expired coupons (I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration), an old broken dog collar, 57 VHS tapes (which still boggles my mind since we don’t even have a VHS player anymore), a set of wooden shelves, a woven basket, a bunch of ‘decorative’ spiral willow wands, and a couple coats that I forgot I had- probably because they were actually hanging up where they belonged instead of stuffed wherever surface tension would ensure they couldn’t fall. It was embarrassing. Did I mention the set of surround sound speakers and the phone we’ve been missing for two years were in there, too?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a dirty person. I always meant to clean that closet out. I even had plans to build some shelves in there to store our DVDs and ‘get organized’ (ha!). It just took a mouse in the house to move it up the ‘list’. While I was cleaning that closet out I had plenty of time to think. I thought about how much easier it would have been to catch this one little mouse if I had cleaned the closet out months ago, like I intended, instead of watching old Stargate re-runs on hulu. I thought about the things that God’s been asking me to get rid of in my life: things like anger, pride, ambition, fear, laziness, a lack of understanding of who I am, a lack of understanding of who God is. I thought about these things in much the same way that I thought of the mouse: I know that they are there, I can see the evidence in my life like mouse poop on the closet floor but I can never see them, much less get rid of them.
Standing there in the middle of the living room, surrounded by all the junk I pulled out of the closet, I had a quiet epiphany. If a real living and breathing creature was this hard to find, how much harder would it be to track down the intangible things God wanted out of my life? I’ve been dismayed in the past because, every time I think I have one of these ‘critters’ taken care of and thrown out with the garbage, I yell at my kids or have an ugly thought about my husband. You might say that I get a glimpse of something that’s not supposed to be there from the corner of my eye and turn my head just in time to see a tail disappearing under the closet door. Honestly, I think I’m more afraid of opening that closet than I am of tracking down these things in my life, too. Who knows what I will find if I really start to look around in there?
Psalms 139: 23-24 says,
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
You see, I am too easily distracted and clumsy to effectively search out all the hidey-holes of my heart -the places that sin escapes to when the lights come on. Thank goodness I can trust God to take care of that part. I just need to listen when He comes to the living room and tells me that He found another mouse. Of course, listening isn’t worth much without obedience and, at the risk of carrying this analogy too far and becoming –ahem- cheesy (sorry, I couldn’t resist), I imagine the spiritual disciplines are ‘mousetraps’. We sit silently before God to see if there are any mice hiding in the walls and we fast and pray to learn how we might get rid of them.
Mostly, though, God is teaching me that I need to put things away. I need to take care of the small things as soon as He tells me about them instead of stuffing them into a closet (As if I can hide things from God!) and smiling at my cleverness.
Next time God finds a ‘mouse’ in my house, I plan on having a clean closet.
