In 2007 one of my daughters and her husband bought a big, beautiful home in El Paso’s upper valley. With its one-half acre lot and aged brick driveway, the house was an impressive sight. Upon moving in, my daughter and son-in-law immediately updated every room with travertine floors, granite counter tops, and stainless appliances. Life looked sweet.
A few months later, however, they began to notice an inordinate number of bees around the doors and windows. My son-in-law investigated and discovered that a colony of bees had built a hive in an attic recess that was nearly inaccessible to humans. He determined that this was a job for a professional exterminator, and they immediately called one.
The exterminator treated the area, assured them that they bees were history, collected his one-hundred twenty dollars, and left. My daughter was greatly relieved to discover that the bees had, indeed, disappeared—for a while. Within a few weeks, however, the bees had returned in greater force than before. Again, the exterminator was called, the fee was paid and the problem appeared to be eradicated. But, no, within a few weeks the bees were back in even greater numbers.
My daughter, who has two young children and was very concerned about the situation, and began to pray that God would help them get rid of the bees. She was, of course, expecting that one morning she would wake up and the bees would have mysteriously disappeared.
Instead, she awoke one morning to the sound of gnawing in the attic above the ceiling in her bedroom. It did not sound like a small animal gnawing; it sounded like dozens of creatures gnawing. Horrified, Victoria leaped out of bed. The gnawing continued for days, and then she began to see tiny mice squeeze through places around the baseboards that were so small that no one would believe that anything could get through them. She set out traps and D-Con and still they came. She and her husband were just about at their wits end when the gnawing stopped and the mice disappeared as suddenly as they had come.
It seems that when bees build a hive, the honey attracts other bees. Because they had built it in a spot that could not be accessed by humans, either from the inside or the outside of the home, no amount of exterminating the bees was going to provide a permanent solution. As soon as the bees were dead, new bees arrived to take their places. Poison could be injected into the area where the hive had been built, but there was no way to remove the honey and wax that they had left behind. Actually, there was one way; a colony of mice could devour every last drop of the honey and wax that had been left behind, and they could lick every surface “clean” so that no trace of the sticky sweet substance remained.
I think this incident is a great reminder that God’s ways are not our ways. When we pray for help, we usually expect an easy, pain-free solution to our problem. Sometimes, however, when God begins to move, we are confronted with what seems to be an even worse problem. As we deal with life’s curve balls, we need to remember that God’s solutions are not always as pleasant as we would like for them to be, but His solutions are permanent. He has an answer to every problem that results in removing all the residue that would continue to plague us if it were not dealt with.
Yes, hearing the gnawing and seeing the mice pop through places that they didn’t even know there were places, was horrifying, but the solution was permanent. My daughter and her family lived in that home for several more years before moving to Dallas, and they never again saw another bee or another mouse.
Although I knew that they had a bee problem, Victoria did not share the mouse problem with me until it had been resolved. The day that she related their harrowing experience, she began by saying, “Mom, be careful what you pray for.”
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