God, the Gutter, and Naked Rodents

I work overnights and when I came home Wednesday morning, I parked in the front of the house because I wanted to be in the shade. Well that was a pipedream, but I was too lazy to go park behind the house. Anywho, as I was leaving to go my friend Tim’s house for the 4^th, I saw what I can only guess was a baby squirrel in the gutter in front of passenger side front tire.

When I say a baby squirrel, I mean a ‘baby’. This thing had no hair , and it’s eyes weren’t fully developed and it was all gross. I couldn’t find a nest anywhere, so I have no idea where it came from and how long it had been crawling through the gutter. There was a pebble stuck in the skin on the back of its head, and I did not want to risk pulling it out.

Not really knowing what I could do for it, I grabbed a napkin from the car and picked it up from the gutter. As many of us know, the more fragile something is, the harder it is to pick it up without breaking it. The squirrel did not want to be picked up; it kept trying to crawl out of my hands, and I didn’t want to hold it too tightly for fear of doing more damage. In the end, I placed it under a plant growing in the yard so at least it would be in the shade. The squirrel immediately began to crawl away from where I had placed it.

I was struck by how similar this is to life, because we are all like that squirrel. We are vulnerable, gross, and really don’t know what’s best for us. We spend so much time blindly crawling around, trying to find a safe place, all the while trying to keep hidden the things we are ashamed of. We hate the situations we are in but can’t seem to change them, and so we blunder forward into who knows what, doing the same things we were doing before.

God sees us as we are, where we have been, where we are going, and where we can go if we go with him. He did not simply turn his back on us when he ejected us from the Garden of Eden, but stayed alongside us and is continually making a way for us to be with him.

But we fight and scrape and move in the opposite direction, not accepting God’s grace. We confuse obedience for slavery, and the chains of sin for freedom. And God goes nowhere, waiting patiently, but not forcing his will upon us.

I don’t know what happened to that squirrel; I looked for it after I got home, and again the next morning without finding it. I don’t know if it would have been more merciful to just kill it. But I do know that I tried to help it and it didn’t want my help, that I was trying to something good and it couldn’t tell because it was just a hairless baby rodent. It had an excuse to fight against compassion, and in that way I envy him.