We caught the mouse!!

It must have started with a piece of bread or some other little bit of food. But he took it and nothing happened. He didn’t live in our place, so he must have grabbed whatever he could and run away to wherever his original home was. Soon this little nibble was not enough and the stolen food must have increased. But we still didn’t notice what was happening and really never found much trace or evidence of him around our place.

Over time though the grabbing and running technique must have gotten wearisome and he decided to find a corner in house, where he could stash his loot and enjoy it later. He slowly settled in to a corner of our home and once the lights were off his time of collecting and enjoyment began. But now the evidence against him began to add up. There was a different smell in a corner of the kitchen and bits of crusted bread or watermelon lying suspiciously in places no one would really sit and eat them. The corner was cleaned as soon as the bits of food were found. He’d been found out! But by now the temptation of the food and the force of habit were too much to overcome and so rather than pay heed to the dangers that awaited him because his cover had been blow, and rather than scurrying off to another home where he could operate with stealth, he decided to find another corner in the same house.

Now my wife and I are not really the “catch and kill a mouse” kind of people. But something had to be done and so after much deliberation and few little emotional discussions, the trap was set. By now he must have been a confident little guy because he knew the lay of the land and he was operating with little or no consequence to him at all. After all the worst we did was clean up his droppings and clean out a corner that he once called home. So with all that confidence he chanced upon the biscuit bits lying in a corner of a shelf. The briefest moment to think would have told him that this was a never before occurrence and so something must be fishy. But his confidence was his undoing and he went for the biscuits.

I thought about this while I drove away from him this morning. What were some of the reasons that he so easily got trapped? His greed for sure. But there was also this gradual settling into a life where his actions bore no consequences and that lulled him into a place of apathy and false security.

In Psalm 1 the bible calls us away from walking in the steps of the wicked; standing in the path of the sinner or sitting in the company of scoffers. There is a gradual progression from walking to sitting. That is how sin gets us. When we indulge our own desires or entertain our greed, not in big amounts just in tiny bits. When we do that and there’s no immediate consequence or ramification then we are filled with a confidence to do a little more next time. There are very few stories of sin that just appeared out of the blue in a person’s life. Often you’ll find that there were patterns of unchecked smaller sins that slowly bred a sense of “I can get away with it” within the person.

Let’s be careful with how we live. Just because there was no immediate consequence to what we chose to watch, think, say or do doesn’t make it right and definitely doesn’t make it not dangerous or harmful for us.

Oh and we caught the mouse!