Gus Is Dead

Late at night in our kitchen you could here the tell tale signs that there was a mouse living with us.  I had seen him scurry across the spice rack once or twice, which I kept a secret, until the night Michelle caught glimpse of our fleeting friend.  Michelle collects mice, but the kind she likes have big ears, are made of plastic, and look a lot like Mickey Mouse.  Gus did not meet any of these descriptions.  He was certainly alive and wandering freely between the back of the stove and the pantry.

We could never seem to find where he would disappear to.  Then one morning Gus got a little too brave.  Jonathan saw him in the living room during an early morning breakfast.  It was light out already and as Jonathan took chase with a stick, Gus scuttled along the wall, behind the hutch, behind the pantry cupboard and for the first time I watched him slip into a hole in the wall where the telephone lines come out.  “I gotcha” I yelled and we began to lay out our battle plans. 

First stop was the grocery store where we investigated various forms of tracking gear.  Most slammed shut with tremendous force but many looked cheap and not likely to work.  Several forms of tasty poisons seemed like a good idea until we came upon the bright red tube with the words “Rat Stop” on the side.  It was a gooey substance that you spread on cardboard and then you had to wait until the mouse runs across it and then gets stuck!  I thought this is never going to work but its cheap so lets give it a try!

That night we laid out a strip 2 inches wide and 2 feet long just below the mysterious hole in the wall, which we knew for sure was Gus’s front porch.  What kind of dumb mouse would slide down the wall right into our trap, I thought, surely he will see our little trick and scamper right around it.

Sure enough the first day all I saw was cockroaches, mosquitoes, and flies.  The second day when I looked just on the edge of the little strip lay Gus wiggling with all his might to free himself from the gooey mess he had put his nose into.  The instructions said that you should release the rodent two miles from your home.  Poor Gus was already looking like slow cat food so we decided to release him just across our street in the trash dump . . . with a shovel. May he rest in peace!

Gus was so predictable.  All the world to travel in and he chose the two inch strip we laid for him as a trap.  When I look at the world I meet person after person who seems to return right to the pattern of their lives and fall into Satan’s trap.  They have the whole world with freedom in Christ but they seem to return to their one little track, stuck with sin’s grip and headed for destruction.  May we never be so dumb as Gus.