A Mouse Unwilling To Die (Literally)

I turned on the light in the basement office this morning and settled down on the sofa to think, read and pray.

My quiet was soon interrupted, however, by a periodic and puzzling rustling sound. Within a minute or two I was up off the sofa and walking slowly toward its source. A mouse? Did we have to call in the exterminators? I was quite relieved to discover that the sounds were coming from outside of the house. A mouse had fallen into the window-well outside my basement office window and was now fully engaged in a strenuous bid for freedom.

Stuck in the window-well? Good news for me. (He's not in the house!) Bad news for the mouse, however! His prospects were grim. Barring intervention on my part, his exhausted demise in the freezing cold would arrive in due time. He had obviously (and quite mistakenly) decided that the light now pouring through the window pane was pointing him to salvation. Every few seconds I could see (and hear) him leap up against the glass pane. All to no avail.

What to do.

Well, I couldn't see myself enjoying my morning prayer time while listening to the rhythmic sounds of a dying rodent hurling himself against my window. To my shame, I do admit that I might just possibly have tolerated a quiet death. But this fellow wasn't going to die quietly. As I watched the mouse continue to struggle, my desire to help him out of his tight spot grew stronger and stronger. But it was cold outside! And how would I do it without hurthing him?

What to do.

Still watching the mouse hopeless flail about, I found myself reflecting on the fact that Jesus approved of retrieving sheep out of wells, even on the sabbath. Should I rescue a mouse from my window-well during this hour set aside for prayer? There was definitely scriptural precedent. I had to try. I sallied forth from the basement, grabbed a bucket and a stick, and ventured out into the cold, dark morning air to redeem a helpless mouse from certain death.

My mission was noble and my cause was right, but it quickly became clear that the mouse saw things differently. As soon as he saw me, he pressed himself into a tight corner of the window-well and refused to budge. How to tempt, badger or otherwise cajole him into the bucket? Thus began my early-morning battle of wits with a rodent.

It being a dark and cold morning, I confess I wasn't about to play the long game. I began to prod the mouse with the stick, hoping to work him toward the bucket. This mouse, however, was not ready to die just yet. After several minutes of poking and prodding, all I had managed to do was to make him squeal a great deal and scoot several times from one tight corner of the window-well to another. Time for a new strategy. Time for better tools!

I went to the garage and returned with a gardening trowel. With this equipment upgrade I did finally manage to flip him unceremoniously into the bucket — but it took several minutes of effort and I am fairly sure that I gave the poor, bedraggled, frantically squealing mouse a rather comprehensive bruising in the process.

I emptied the bucket out onto the frozen ground and watched the ungrateful wretch scurry off into a neighbor's garden. Mission accomplished. As I walked back into the house, I found myself pondering the lessons lurking in what I had just experienced.

If the mouse had trusted me and/or been ready to die, things would have gone very smoothly. But this mouse did not trust me one bit and he wasn't ready to die either. Zero for two. So, for our little friend the mouse, the road to salvation was paved with pain, panic and fear.

It did not have to be thus. After all, both the mouse and I shared a common goal: we both wanted him to be freed from the window-well. The problem, of course, was that the mouse didn't know better than to trust his bodily instincts for self-preservation. In this situation, of course, those instincts served him poorly. He did not understand that the great power looming over him with a stick was actually working for his eventual good.

Needless to say, I was reminded of how we struggle in like manner with our Lord. How much of our pains and sorrows would cease if we would simply let God have his way with us? It might mean letting some things within us die. Are we prepared to trust him with that? Or are we, like that mouse, going to make the process a painful debacle for all participants?

C. S. speaks eloquently of this in the following passage taken from his book Mere Christianity.

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says `Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked - the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.'

Both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, 'Take up your Cross'- in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute he says, 'My yoke is easy and my burden light.' He means both. And one can just see why both are true.

Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest things to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.

It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call 'ourselves,' to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be 'good'. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way-centred on money or pleasure or ambition-and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

Amen.