As I talked about last weekl, the house I lived in my last year in Dallas was pretty bad. Another problem was that we had rats. Big, fat, gross rats. We learned this after two events. First my roommate had a flat of Gatorade on the floor of the pantry/laundry room, a rat chewed through the plastic bottle and spilled liquid electrolytes all over the floor. He thought the bottle just broke when he put it down, so he didn’t tell anyone until later. Second, and the sign that we had a real problem, I went into the pantry to get bread to make a sandwich. However, my bread was not where I left it on the TOP shelf, it was on the floor with a chunk eaten out of the side.
I walked out and told my roommates that we had a problem. At first, we thought it was mice. Small, cute, and easy to trap. But my small humane trap failed so my roommate got the biggest old school trap I’d ever seen. Again, we were young, this was the first time we had ever faced a home invasion problem like this. After a week, he had taken out three big ones. As bad as it was it gets grosser from there but if you want that part I can tell you about it some other time.
In all the time we lived there, the only rats we saw were the ones we trapped. We saw the evidence, but we never saw the cause. CS Lewis uses rats to describe our own sinfulness. Most of us know the difference between right and wrong, and when we sin it is often out of choosing selfish desires over what is right.
Lewis describes his sin this way, “When I … try to reckon up the sins of the day, …the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered…. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself.” Often it is all too easy to find an excuse for the wrongs we’ve done when we are caught off guard. But Lewis suggests that when we are caught off guard is when we are our truest selves.
When we stomped into the pantry, the rats heard us coming and scurried away. To catch them we would need to use caution and precision. It’s the same with our own sinfulness. It’s something that will always be there, and we must take the time to slow down and address it if we ever hope to improve the people we are when we are caught off guard.
Let us honestly pray Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”