On Thursday, I walked into our guest room and was immediately hit with a smell that made me want to gag. Dead mouse. I knew it. Having worked in an older school building for five years, I am more than familiar with the smell of dead mice. My friend, Krisjan, inevitably had a dead mouse in her classroom every year, and it would take months and hours of searching to locate the little critter and get it out. I hate mice. Dead or alive, I have no idea of God’s purpose when he put them on this planet.
When Andy got home, I quickly directed him to the guest
room. “Are you sure it isn’t just our
shoes?” he asked scanning the shoes we have hanging on the back of the
door. Ummm… no honey. Not unless you
have a dead critter in your dress blacks.
We scoured the room to no avail, so I did what any girl would do in such
a dire situation – I called my dad. He
suggested vacuuming out the air vents, especially when I told him the smell was
more overwhelming when the heat was blowing.
We tried it. No such luck. I called him again. I got my mom.
Her advice? Just deal with it –
surely it would decompose before long.
My mom values independence in her children, but dead mouse expert that I
am, I knew it would take months and months to decompose. We’d be moved out of this rental house before
the smell would be gone, and our guest room would be completely uninhabitable
in the meantime. I begged to speak to my
dad. His solution? He would come mouse hunting in Charlotte the
next morning.
Let me preface all of this by saying that in situations that
I can’t control, I panic. The first
winter I lived in the house I owned in Greenville, I had mice. Live mice.
Running around my house. I
panicked. Just ask my friend Rebecca whom
I called at 3:00 am so that I could come to her house in my pajamas and crash
in her guest room to escape the little pests.
I called my dad that time too, and by 4:00 that afternoon, he was
standing on my front porch with mouse traps and his overnight bag. He didn’t leave until the mice were gone.
Extermination needs aren’t the only ones my dad meets. He is also handy in car accident
situations. Last year, I was driving
from home to work on a Tuesday morning and out of nowhere, a car tire fell from
the sky and knocked out my windshield.
Well, “almost nowhere” is a bit of an exaggeration. It was actually the doing of a Farmville
native, overall wearing man named Zebediah who didn’t feel it important to
secure the tire resting on the top of his minivan as he only had a 50 mile
drive that day. Unbelievably, the tire didn’t stay in place when his speed
exceeded 45 MPH, and instead it almost totaled my poor Camry. My reaction? Complete meltdown. My dad’s solution? To drive from Norwood to Farmville hauling an
extra truck on a trailer behind him so I would have a way home from work and
something to drive while my car was being repaired.
Clearly, my dad demonstrates love through acts of service,
and he is one of those people that I believe has a solution for everything. I also love the fact that he will drop
everything and come when I need him most.
These types of service are his absolute strengths.
Someone reading this blog might think that I am a “daddy’s
girl” and that I grew up closer to him than anyone else, but interestingly I
was closer to my mom growing up, and even now, my mom is one of my best
friends. Andy and I were in the car for
several hours this weekend while we travelled, and we had the chance to talk
about the parenting difference between my mom and dad. The interesting thing I realized in our
conversation is that they both have separate strengths that make a wonderful
balance. You see, where my dad comes
through in the big things, my mom is there in the day to day. Growing up, my mom was at every sporting
event, band concert, and youth group event.
My mom packed our lunches and knew our teachers and heard all the inner
workings of our friendships and dating relationships. We are adults now, but she still knows it all. She asks questions, sends emails, calls us on
the phone, and as my youngest brother says, “interrogates” us for
information. She knows the names of my
students, and my favorite places in Charlotte, and what is going on with all my
Greenville girls.
My mom is awesome in the day to day, but I know she would
never come to Charlotte and crawl under my house to find the source of my mouse
problem which is what my dad did on Friday.
On the flip side, though, I’m not sure my dad could mention by name all the
bridesmaids in my wedding. I don’t know
what life would have looked like if I had been raised by only one of my
parents, but I know that the combination of the two of them is perfect.
Interestingly, the differences between my mom and dad probably
represent common differences between lots of moms and dads. Women are more relational and as such,
probably more interested in the day to day life of their children. Men are more product driven and work
focused. They aren’t as interested in
long heart-to-hearts as they are in making a difference in a specific
situation. In the new Bible study I’m
doing with my small group, those differences would be labeled tenderness
(women) and strength (men). While I was
reflecting on the difference between my parents to Andy this weekend, he made
the comment that they represent the “image of God” to me. Given that the traits they each have are
common traits for their genders makes me wonder if God’s divine purpose in
creating family to include a mom and a dad is that men and women each represent
unique traits of God to their children.
You see, God is the perfect parent. Like a mother, He is there for us in the day
to day. As the Psalmist says in Psalm
139, “O Lord, You have looked through me and have known me. You know when I sit down and when I get
up. You understand my thoughts from far
away.” He knows all the small things we
think and feel, and he sees us in the day to day. Like a father, though, he is also able to
rescue us in our time of great need.
Speaking of an imminent release from 70 years of Babylonian captivity,
God tells the Jewish people in Jeremiah 29, “’Then you will call upon Me and
come and pray to Me and I will listen to you.
You will look for Me and find Me, when you look for Me with all your
heart. I will be found by you,’ says the
Lord, ‘And I will bring you back and gather you from all the nations.’”
I can’t help but wonder if God designed the family life to
show children a picture of himself. Like
a mother, he will care for our every need and support us in our daily lives,
and like a father, he will rescue us when we feel we can’t make it any
longer. The church puts a lot of
pressure on men these days because God is compared in the Bible most often to a
father. I have heard sermon after sermon
on how important it is for men to focus more on their families and be present
for their wives and children, and all of that is true and good, but I’m
wondering if our focus should change some. What if BOTH men and women took their roles of
parenting seriously? What if both
partners saw that their job is to show a unique part of God’s character to
their children so that those children could better know the Lord?
Matthew 7:11 says, “You are bad and you know how to give
good gifts to your children. How much
more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?” We have to know that even on our best days,
we are still bad at being a picture of God to the world. We are sinful, and fallen, and we don’t see
the big picture the way God does, but how awesome is it that even in spite of
all of that, parents can still bring joy to their children. My dad coming to check out my mouse situation
brought me such calm, and as it turns out, he wasn’t even able to fix the
problem. In fact, we are still in the
process of finding someone who can remove a dead mouse from a heating unit
(which was the diagnosis of the scent). But, on Friday, knowing that my dad was
there and had the potential to help brought me out of panic mode. How much more powerful is it that I can see
the good gift my dad brought me, and know that I have an even greater Father in
heaven who created the mice and knows just how to help me – in that or any
other situation. Which is why I’m
praying he’ll send us a good exterminator!
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