Remember the mouse that I saw scurry through our living room? And how we were faced with the dilemma of dealing with the little critter? (Catch up on that story here if you need to.)
Well, this is the story of how we did that. One trap, one prayer at a time.
As I mentioned, the first thing we went about doing was shoring up the holes where we thought the mouse was getting in through. The closer we looked, the more we located more and more possibilities for the tiny creature. So we started the process of filling them in, closing them up in hopes that no more friends would join in the party.
But then we had to deal with the mouse (or mice) that were already here. After discussing our options, we decided we wanted to buy traps rather than poison because we wanted to know if we’d got the mice and keep them from dying somewhere in our house.
We placed them strategically, with a dab of cashew butter as bait. After the first night, we went and checked them. The mouse had managed to nibble the butter off without setting off the trap. This guy was craftier than we’d expected!
So we re-set the trap and put the bait further along the back, so that they had to climb in further. We caught one that night. I was so thrilled but wondered if there might be more? My fears were concluded the following evening when I was putting away groceries and as I placed a bottle of olive oil in a cupboard, a mouse jumped out and ran behind the stove.
Of course, I screamed bloody murder and my husband came running, thinking I’d cut myself on a knife or something. Oh, no. Just a flying, daredevil mouse, that’s all.
So we reset the traps again, realizing that this was not a one-mouse ordeal as we’d first hoped. Over the course of five nights, we caught five mice.
The entire time, I kept praying that there would be no more. That the Lord would keep them away so that we didn’t have to keep catching and killing them. And yet, then we’d catch another.
Finally, on Saturday night of that week, after catching the fifth mouse, I was desperate. I stood in our kitchen and was reminded of the place in Matthew where Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
These mice were much smaller than any mountain. If my faith could move a mountain, surely it could move a handful of mice. And so I took that command to heart and, out loud, told the mice to leave this house, in the name of Jesus Christ.
The next morning, my husband and I went to church. One of the things that I fell in love with when we first started checking out this church was that they take prayer requests during the service and pass around prayer-request binders that the leaders pray over and that get emailed out to all the members. Prayer is not something underestimated, here.
In the binder, my husband wrote down our paltry prayer request: That there would be no more mice in our house. It was not asking for healing or salvation or any other prayer request that deserves to be answered. But yet, our prayers need not be big for the Lord to care about them and take them seriously. The only requirement of our prayers? That we ask.
So we did.
And you should not be surprised to find out that we have not caught a single mouse since. Not a single one. No sightings of any other ones, either. The cashew butter is fresh on the traps, waiting just in case. And it’s been that way ever since.
Because even though God cares about all the big things in our lives, he also cares about the littlest. Like a tiny, brown mouse who popped in for a visit.
Carmen writes the blog, Life Blessons, which provides an intimate look into her life as a twentysomething woman as she details her experiences learning how to live out her faith, enjoy the simple things in life and be the woman God created to her to be. Along the way, she shares the blessings and lessons that are a part of this journey, the things she likes to call her "blessons."
Feel free to learn more at her blog, Life Blessons.
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