Kiwi In Mouse Clothing
My almost-blind granny was best known for her plain, Midwestern cooking. Her culinary skills were honed during the war using items from the ration list. Grandma never used food with funny names like Ugli fruit or ate daring crosses like apple-pear. She lived in a tiny, Midwestern town that considered bananas exotic.
One day my father, desiring to expand his mother’s horizons, purchased a kiwi fruit for Grandma. Gram had never seen or heard of Kiwi. In a hurry to get home to his family, Dad failed to tell her about the additional fruit as he placed the sack of groceries on Gram’s kitchen table.
Grandma unpacked her plain cheese, her plain milk, her plain coffee. Then she unpacked… oh my, what is that small, hard, furry thing?– Eek! A mouse!
The “mouse” rolled out of the bag. Grandma snatched her trusty broom from the corner. She chased the mouse around the kitchen and batter it until it was reduced to the pulpy mess. A mess she took to be mouse guts.
I batter phantom guts around too. I see God’s gifts to me, but sometimes they don’t look like gifts, they look like vermin. Seeing through my narrow field of sight, that tunnel vision of my own humanity, I chase after those brown fruit blobs, thinking they are scary little beings, slimy little rats.
I beat and beat those ”mice” around with my broom of misunderstanding, my broom of fear and discontent. I say to God, “Why this? Why this hideous little thing scampering across my floor?” Sometimes I ask God to take the little mouse and go away– leave me be.
But when the mouse (and God) show no sign of taking their leave– when I have exhausted my bag of annoyed and angry appeals– when I have beat the thing in front of me to a pulpy mess and still don’t know anything, then I do the only thing left. I settle my fretful spirit. I quiet down. I try to figure out what this mouse actually is, what I’m supposed to learn.
In those chases I’ve decided I know exactly what God is up to. I believe, somehow, I can read his holy mind. “Oh yes, God,” I say. “You must be doing thus and such, and I am supposed to do such and thus. And once I do that such and thus, then this icky mousy thing happening to me will be over”
Ha!
Read the mind of the God who delights in confounding the worldly wise with foolish things? Read the mind of the God who makes the first, last, and the last, first? That’s like trying to decode The Holiest Mind with a plastic Dick Tracy decoder watch. This is God– tricky God–who sends blessing-kiwis that for all the world look more like mouse-curses.
Who can read his holy mind? Who can understand this kiwi gifts?
The gift I most often fail to recognize (or want to recognize) is the gift of pain. Years ago I listened to the final gasps of a diseased and dying relationship. I felt God was leaving me alone in a “mouse”-infested place. “Where are you?” I asked at least a billion times. I could not imagine any good thing coming of this very deep and visceral pain. I could not imagine ever being a whole person after chasing this painful mouse around to my exhaustion.
Pain is not something a sane person wishes for. It is gut-wrenching and soul-draining. But this pain, for me, was a kiwi in mouse clothing. I grew a little stronger and a bit wiser because of it.
Like it or not, I learn best when I hurt. When I stop shouting at God about my discomfort- when I take my mouth closed and listen, I realize that pain can be a gift, a kiwi.
God is a patient god. Despite my desperate pleas for a easy life and m blindness to the good in doing things His way, God continues to hand in there with me. He listens to be whine at each difficult pass in my read. And he heaps bags of blessings on my table, kiwis by the truckload. I think he hopes that one day I won’t automatically look at the good gift he’s placed before me and think… oh my, what is that thing? And then scream, “Mouse!” as I run for the broom.
By Kim Bolton & Chris Wave
(Published In: Conversations at the Girlville Diner)
