Varmints!

Mickey and Minnie they are not!  My husband’s benevolent spirit in feeding birds brought some unwanted visitors to the hanging feeder in our back yard.  Their bigger cousins (ugh) visited, too.  In past years, we’ve had raccoons hang around.  And we live in town!

My revulsion over the “real thing” causes me to stand amazed at how a disgusting animal could become a symbol of family fun, as in Disney’s playlands, touted (tongue-in-cheek) as the “Greatest People Trap Ever Built By a Mouse.”

I actually have a very remote connection to the man who began it all, who died the year after I graduated from high school. A few blocks away from our family home in Western Washington lived a retired teacher who had once taught at the school my mother attended in childhood, in rural eastern Montana.  Her teaching career later took her to another state where she had a grade school student whom she remembered as being quite a “dreamy little guy.”  His name: Walt Disney.  I don’t recall how she ended up in our hometown, but she certainly had a brief claim to fame.

Enough fun memories....As for the real, dirty, annoying furry critters that came uninvited to our bird feeder, I thought how their presence at the ledge for feathered friends doesn’t make them a bird any more than “going to church” makes one a Christian.  Jude, known for his blunt language, made that a major point of his letter, the next-to-last book of the Bible.

After scorning Sodom and Gomorrah for giving into sexual immorality and perversion (is our culture doing the same?) and naming other rebellion recorded in the Bible, Jude zeroes in on the faith-pretenders:

These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm...These men are grumblers and faultfinders; they follow their own evil desires; they boast about themselves and flatter others to their own advantage. (Jude 12, 16)

My point? Be wise. Pray for your church.  Pray for those whom you discern to be “playing church” and who need the authentic heart transformation possible only through Jesus Christ. 

Mice nibble and steal.  Birds sing.