I found my snake again

He has escaped 4 or 5 times now. I usually find him a couple of weeks after he escapes, cold and hungry. He's a corn snake, and has never bitten anyone so there is no fear of danger there, and it's always a funny surprise when he drops out of the blinds and lands with a thud next to me. This time was pretty interesting… I was playing Dragon Warrior 1 -on my moded Dreamcast with the Nester emulator (Ding ding! 1,000 geek points!) - a little after midnight. All the lights were off except for a lamp in my bedroom. From where I was sitting in the living room I noticed the light flickering. I got up to investigate and found The Snake, (That's his name.) coiled around the cord to the lamp and the box fan. The fan was on full blast since I don't have air-conditioning. To my horror I discovered that The Snake had inserted his head into said fan about 3 or 4 inches. I quickly turned off the fan and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it had somehow managed to keep from decapitating itself. Then came the really annoying part. Snakes don't like to back up. Their scales don't go that way. I pried the plastic grill apart as far as I could and slowly worked the thing back out. But the harder I would pull, the harder it would resist and every time I relaxed my grip it would drive itself further in. Its tail was lashing around the cords, tangling itself up. It was a difficult and probably painful (for The Snake) process, but eventually I extracted him and put him back in his cage. This time I put a 50 pound bucket of plaster on the lid to discourage any further Houdini shenanigans.

The immediate parallel this little adventure brought to my mind was the way people are never content with the grace and provision God has given them. I feed and water The Snake regularly. I let him out for exercise. But for some reason he just has to get free. Although his natural habitat is grass and undergrowth, The Snake always tries to climb as high as he can get. I have a six foot tall indoor fountain I made that looks like a miniature mountain with a bonsai tree on top. The Snake loves climbing through all the little holes and arches and getting to the top where he gets tangled up in the tree and stretches up as high as he can like he's trying to reach heaven.

But my provision isn't good enough. Just like people get discontent with whatever they have. Once our basic needs are met we desire more and more and more. We leave the safety of God's plan and slither off in the darkness. Then we find the nearest fan and stick our head in it. Or some other equally stupid thing like drugs, pornography, intellectual elitism, sexual immorality, jealousy, etc. Then God has to track us down and carefully pry our head out of the trap we have so blithely rammed it into. And that process usually hurts.

I'm so grateful that God hasn't gotten tired of pulling my head out of fans.

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