Getting to the Church on Time.....A Furry Kind of Disruption

How many seamless Sunday church mornings have you had in your parenting lifetime? I'm willing to bet not very many; the enemy doesn't want families going to church. When God is the center of a family, there is great power. Not surprisingly, when families gather together to worship, the power generated is absolutely phenomenal. The Bible tells us not to forsake the fellowship of other believers; He wants to work through us corporately, as well as individually.

Before I knew Christ, I didn't believe in Satan. In fact, when someone would bring up spiritual warfare or Satan, I rolled my eyes (behind their back, of course) and figured they were one of those "Fundamentalists". Now that my eyes have been opened, I know that Satan is in fact an ex-angel. He turned away from God, presumably from jealously, and became a powerful enemy. He has real power, surely, but only the power WE give him when we take our eyes off the Lord.

Sometimes God uses Satan, and gives people over to him for good, if their hearts are continually unrepentant and irreversibly hard. When I read about vile, heinous crimes, I have to wonder if the perpetrators are examples of people who've been given over to Satan. Crimes against children definitely fall into this category for me. One can argue that such criminals are just "out of their minds", and in a sense that's true. With Satan having free reign within them, their hearts become more and more vile, their crimes become more and more vile, and finally, their hearts are just plain dead. The secular world would call such a person a psychopath, I presume.

Anyway......back to getting to the church on time. I'm willing to bet your craziest late-for-church story might not top this one. Let me know if I'm wrong. LOL

At 8:00 a.m. Daniel lets out a shrill scream from the playroom. I immediately assumed he'd somehow cut himself, broken his leg, or other such disaster.

I ran in there, mercilessly shaking up the baby in my tummy, to find Daniel standing on the preschool table.

Daniel: "There's a mouse in the house!"

Mommy: "What! There can't be! You've got to be kidding me!"

Daniel: "I saw it in the corner of my eye."

Mommy: "What color was it?"

Daniel: "Black."

Mommy: "That's not a mouse. It's probably a mole."

Now for some background. We periodically get baby moles who somehow crawl in through the laundry room. In the three years we've been here, we've encountered three, but we've yet to discover the point of entry.

Daniel, hearing that it's ONLY A MOLE, calms down considerably, then climbs down and starts looking for it. And I know what's coming, bloggey friends. I can read that Daniel like a book. He no sooner starts looking for it then I hear the inevitable:

Daniel: "When we find it can I keep it for a pet? Pleeease? Don't hurt it, Mommy! Last time Daddy accidentally hurt one with a broom."

We're sorry suckers for this kind of thing. We currently have a number of Daniel's "pets". Since we can't afford to feed a cat or dog, we are hesitant to say no to his heartfelt requests for pets. Thus, we have an aquarium housing a blue gill fish (Yes, God is good. It's STILL alive) , caught during a fishing trip about three weeks back. We have two fish bowls housing tadpoles, two of which recently became tree frogs. Go figure! We thought we were going to have ordinary frogs on our hands, God willing. It was kind of exciting, actually, discovering they were tree frogs. We're nerdy homeschoolers, for sure.

We have a youngish praying mantis, presumably one of the 75 to 200 praying mantis nymphs we recently had to let go, due to lack of fruit flies with which to feed them. You might remember that Daniel caught an adult praying mantis late last summer, and we saved its egg sac, which hatched tons of nymphs several weeks ago.

At this very moment, Don and the boys are out looking for a pet store that sells baby crickets, to feed to the praying mantis and the tree frogs. My guess is that the tree frogs prefer tree crickets, but whatever. We're doing our best for these little guys.

We have numerous fireflies, which somehow get out of the butterfly netting and end up all over my house. I could go on, but you're probably already freaked out at our weirdness. So I'll stop.

Now, I'm faced with how I should respond to Daniel's request for an actual mammal, the ownership of which, truthfully, I've been trying to avoid. They're dirty and they stink, compared to amphibians, reptiles, insects and spiders. The blue gill would, I'm sure, stink things up, but he's outside, thank God.

Timothy, awake from the sound of Daniel's screams, scurries in to find out what's going on. He isn't into these "pets" as much, but he's always up for an adventure with brother. I decide I will not let a cute, furry baby mole make us late for church; no sirree. I leave them to the hunting and go back to getting ready. I'm definitely not happy about letting this rather disgusting problem go, but I recognize it as Satan's Sunday morning antics; I decide I'm not caving.

While I'm in the bathroom, I hear the boys concoct all these schemes for catching this thing. They're a riot, those two! I'm thoroughly enjoying myself listening to it all, and the teacher in me is thrilled at their problem-solving capabilities. I decide maybe this isn't such a horrible problem after all. They're learning, and this isn't the kind of learning you can get in the classroom. It's the kind that gives you thrills. The kind that drives you to discover something great some day....like a cure for disease, or a new and nifty invention. When you see it going on in your home, and then think of the mindless worksheets they would be given in school, you know precisely why you homeschool. So they will have time for this; thrilling experimentation and discovery take time. Necessary daily lessons don't have to take up a child's whole day.

To make a long story short, they caught the mole. They were absolutely thrilled, and Emily Rose, as well, thought it was a very cute little thing. So much so, that I had to either hold her or put her in the playpen while continuing to get everybody ready for church. She wanted that cute little thing for her very own.

I hope the next baby is a girl, or my Emily will surely end up a tomboy. Not the end of the world, I know. Tomboys are probably very good at thinking outside the box. But I do so love dresses, my bloggey friends. Emily is always comfortably dressed, but with a feminine flair.

The cute little thing turned out to be smarter than we were. We put it in a large diaper box, and after making sure it couldn't crawl out, we went off to church. Daniel and I felt rather sorry for it; it was obviously scared. But I wanted Don to decide what to do with it. My guess was that he would take it to a local park and let it go, although I thought there was an outside chance he might let Daniel keep it for a day or two. It presumably eats grubs and worms, which Daniel could easily find in the garden.

Well, as I said, it ended up being smarter than we were. It chewed its way out of the box, and we've yet to relocate it. You can bet we WILL find it before bed. No way am I going to sleep knowing its got the run of the house. Wish us luck, will ya?

We WERE fifteen minutes late for church! The furry little thing is my story and I'm sticking to it. LOL

Church was fabulous. I was in tears again, most of the service. This church is the most wonderful blessing. The pastor came up to greet the kids and me (he knows us from AWANA) and I told him how moved I've been. He embraced us and said he always knows who's being moved, by the looks on their faces. He was very happy for us, but wouldn't take any credit, of course.

Someday I'm going to be a missionary. That's a sure thing. The fire is in my heart, and there's no putting out what the Holy Spirit puts in. Let's just hope it won't be a country with cockroaches or rats. I do draw a line somewhere, in my appreciation of God's creatures.