Catching Bats

In the night I sensed the presence of a bat.  I woke, startled, just catching a speck of darker shadow flitting above the bed.  

“Stay down!” I commanded the inert form of my sleeping spouse.

I jumped out of bed like a commando and took charge.  Until the bat came around for another fly-by.  I jumped back under the covers.  This time Glen woke up.

“There’s a bat,” I told him, “stay under the covers!”

But then I thought, “ What if that bat has rabies?”  Our (then) young children were asleep in their rooms.

The covers came off and I flew out of bed.  Glen was right behind me.  The bat flew downstairs.

We crept down the stairs in the dark.  Glen still had my back. When we got to the first floor I grabbed a pair of gloves and Glen grabbed a baseball cap.  Bat-protection.

Glen said, “Maybe if we turn on the light, we’ll be able to see better.”  He is a smart man.  We turned on the lights, but the bat disappeared!  NOW we were in trouble!

We searched.  Finally, Glen spotted the creature hanging onto the frame of the antique print above our piano.  The bat looked at us with Bambi eyes...

But still… rabies?  Children?  

So I carefully caught Bambi and placed him in a plastic bowl from the kitchen.  Glen and I wrapped it and - not knowing what else to do in the middle of the night - placed it in our garbage can outside to buy time. We didn’t want to KILL it!

In the morning, the student who was living with us put his garbage out. Wasn’t he surprised when a bat flew out of the garbage can!

Next time the bat paid us a visit, we caught it and drove it far, far away, almost to Massena!  

Next time the bat came to call, we drove it FARTHER away… Almost to Canada.

When the bat returned from that trip, Glen and I were away at a conference.  My mom was home with the kids. Mom’s solution when the bat woke her up in the middle of the night was to call the police.  We never did exactly find out what happened to the bat, but it stopped coming around after that.

Sometimes the solution to a problem looks really hard.  Awful, even.  A bat isn’t going to just move out.  Even if you build it a little bat-house.  Bats take up residence and stay there, generation after generation.  I didn’t want to face the terrible truth that, if I didn’t want to LIVE with the bat, I would have to destroy it.  Somebody else had to do it for me.  (Just so you know, I am NOT advocating killing bats.)

Last weekend, Bishop Bill Clark said that God has brought us to the end of ourselves so that we must rely solely on him.  We are ready to move into a new dimension of New Hope’s existence, but we can only do it through obedience.  He quoted Deuteronomy 7:1-2:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.  

Bishop Clark told us that the name “Hittite” or “Heth,” meant “Terror.” My little bat is a metaphor for fear.  Every time I allow fear to dictate my behavior, I make a treaty with it.  I will go no farther than fear allows.  We will live together in peace as long as I cooperate.  If I am gentle with it, it will return.

But what if God wants me to live in my WHOLE house?  Freely moving from floor to floor, basement to attic?  What if God wants my children to be safe in the house?  My friends and neighbors?

Years ago neighbors down the street found a bat-metropolis in their attic.  When I saw the cost, time, and effort it took for them to have it removed, I knew that we couldn’t afford to make space for bats.

We can’t afford to make space for fear, either.  

Beverly