My wife and I have a history of mouse stories. The first story takes place when we were both still students at Michigan State. Angela and her two roommates had to deal with a mouse situation in their apartment. They named the mouse “Mortimer” (no reason- it just must have sounded like a good mouse name) and then essentially ran away and screamed whenever he poked his little head around anywhere near them. Eventually, the mouse showed his face when all three girls were in the apartment together. Individually they probably would have continued doing nothing, but collectively, they must have found courage to take on their little mouse problem. To make a long story short, they captured Mortimer in a bowl and somehow worked together to transfer him to a pot. From there they filled the pot with water and basically created Mouse soup. Ask Angela about it, and make sure you ask her to imitate Mortimer in the pot.

The mouse problem seemed to follow Angela as we moved into our first house together. After being in the house for a little less than a year, random pieces of what looked like black rice started to appear in the TV room. Of course, I was completely oblivious to the mounting pile of “black rice”. Ironically, they appeared in the same room where I do my push-ups in the morning. If anyone SHOULD HAVE noticed, it should’ve been me, but again, I’m not the most observant person you’ll ever meet. So basically after weeks of doing push-ups in the middle of mouse dung, my wife notices and says, “Joe, I think we have a mouse”. She points to the tiny pieces of you-know-what and tells me what she thinks they are. Of course in typical Kalczynski fashion I go into denial mode. “No…I don’t think it’s that,…it’ll be fine….it’s no big deal…etc.”

So after my wife convinces me that we need to take care of the problem, I reluctantly go to the store thinking about the exorbitant cost of catching this mouse. I start imagining the book I’m going to have to buy which will tell me where to put the traps, the magical mouse food that will attract them to the trap, the huge cost of actually buying mouse traps, and everything else my wife is going to want to buy. When we get to Meijer, I realize that the whole process is actually a lot simpler than I was thinking. We bought 4 traps for $2.08!! Hey, that’s not too expensive!! Apparently peanut butter works as good bait, and there was no book to tell me how to position the traps, just the cashier who told us, “Put the traps where you think the mouse has been”. BRILLIANT!! I already KNOW the mouse has been in the TV room because I’ve been doing push-ups for 2 weeks in the middle of his poop.

So we get home, set the traps, and sure enough 2 days later, we have a dead mouse compliments of the $0.52 mouse trap I purchased from Meijer. I’m not going to lie- it was a pretty happy day for me. I protected my house like a good husband should. I had visions of the Under-Armor Commercial: “We must protect this house!!” Plus I learned that mouse control is actually pretty cheap. And, finding a dead mouse in a trap that I set is sort of like a sick & twisted birthday present.

Each year at about the same time, we have had a mouse or mice in the house that needed to be taken care of. So for the past 3 years I’ve protected my house from those darn field mice that invade us so regularly. Last night, instead of the “black rice” on the carpet, my wife actually saw the mouse itself as she was talking on the phone to her grandmother. Before she could even finish the phone conversation, I asked her “Do you want me to go to Meijer?” with a big smile on my face.

As I set the traps this year, I thought about how God can be found in mouse traps. It got me to thinking, all the mice that I’ve killed the last three years (5), had no idea that they were going to die before they snuck up on the peanut butter. One day they’re happily living as guests in our house, and the next day they have a metal bar crashing through their neck. And so I thought, instead of killing the mouse this one time, why not catch the mouse, keep it as a pet, and show the mouse some grace. God shows us grace by giving us salvation even though we’ve done nothing to deserve it. Why not show grace toward this new mouse in our house? That way, we could name the mouse “Grace”, and then take care of it even though it deserved death, just like we do. Every time we looked at “Grace”, we’d be reminded of the central message of the Bible, and that would be a good thing.

So last night, after I have this vision of what we can do for the new mouse in our house, I run the plan by my lovely wife of four years (the kindest, most caring person I know, or have ever met). I explain to her “Grace”, is what we can call the mouse, and we’ll be demonstrating God’s love as a reminder of what He has done for us. She says to me, and I quote, “Umm, NO!!…We have guests coming over tomorrow”.

So there you have it. Welcome to my world. I’ll keep everyone informed of when and how many mice we get this year. My grace towards the mouse will have to wait. Maybe next year. I’m glad our Father in Heaven isn’t as easily persuaded as I was to withhold grace.