We have a mouse in the house!  Again.

I know he’s around, I think I can hear it, and I see evidence of the little rodent, but I haven’t been able to spot the little varmint, who is busily making his nest somewhere inside my walls and nibbling on the insulation and wiring in there.  My hope is that he might electrocute himself, but then not only would I hear the thing, I would then likely smell him too!  Ack!

I told the kids when we moved onto our acreage that we would likely experience wild life.  Sure enough, we have had our share of gophers (who look at my garden as a salad bar).  My son has weeded the population down considerably over the years becoming quite a marksman with his .22 in the process.  I’m okay with that.  We have a family of deer that enjoy hanging out by the fence.  My dog barks at them from the confines of the house but they are smart enough to know that our “watch dog” is more a nuisance than a threat to them.  We have coyotes that like to yip and yowl in the middle of the night and especially like to camp out in the evenings to see if we will ever let our little “watch dog” off his rope so they can make an easy meal of him.  They’ve snacked on two of our pets over the years, so we don’t let Samson out of our sight…especially at night.  We have a fox family nearby; we’ve had moose in our yard, a badger, and even a cougar but it seems the animal that gets the most of our negative attention is when we have a mouse in the house.

My “brave” son Brett, has an aversion to mice.  If he knows there is one in the house he is ready to jump up on a chair to make sure the mouse doesn’t suddenly leap out at him and start nibbling on his toes. He’s afraid of mice. He blames me. He said that the phobia started when I caught another mouse guest several years ago and not having the heart to murder the little animal, I instead trapped him in a tupperware jar and asked my son to do the catch and release thing outside. Unfortunately, the mouse decided at the opportune time to make good on his escape as soon as the lid was lifted, but rather than dropping to the ground, he decided to do a burn out on Brett’s hand first and then high tail it off.  This caused considerable shrieking and scurrying (not by the mouse), but by my son, who from that day on has had an elephantine fear of the little critters….and he blames me…of course.

I’ll admit I am not fond of mice. I would rather they made their homes outside and not inside my home, but I don’t lie awake listening for them, or worrying that I will find one sleeping snuggly beside me in my bed like my daughter Carmen does.  She will be moving home in a few weeks after her year in school and if she knows we have a squeaky house guest she will likely sleep with worry that the mouse will somehow creep into her room and play mousey games in there. It’s the logical choice for a mouse really…bypass a kitchen full of cookie crumbs and dry cereal to go play upstairs in my daughter’s bedroom…makes sense to Carmen at least.

Anyway, if this mouse hasn’t been dispatched long before she moves home, I’ll start to go a little looney myself.  He is somewhere in the house, but where he is exactly I can’t say, or where he’ll turn up I can’t guess but I just know he’s in the house and it’s freaking me out.

I am on a mission to get rid of that mouse…

It’s like sin in our lives. We know it’s there, the evidence is there, we know we have to deal with it eventually or it will pester us and pester us until we can’t stand it. We may try to do the catch and release thing but eventually it will creep into our lives again unless we do something…drastic.

The only way to get rid of sin is to let God deal with it…once and for all. It’s the only way.

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

We can’t deny that sin is not there, that is to deny the obvious, but we have a Savior and He died so that we might be free from sin.

I should be as bound and determined to rid myself of sin in my life as I am in catching that mouse!  Something to think about…

As I bait another trap!