Millipedia

After moving back from Norway to a lovely (though overly hot and muggy) little town in Tennessee, I soon found myself settled into a cute, though small, basement apartment. Being in a basement automatically means an increased population of small many-legged visitors, but I thought I had handled the majority of the problem after thoroughly cleaning out all the corners while moving in.

Things seemed to be going well enough for the first week, but by the middle of the second week in my new home, I could see that I had been mislead. An unexpected type of animal had begun to invade my small residence. Tiny millipedes (about an inch long) were squeezing their way through the crack under my door. At first, I only spotted a couple, but quickly their numbers increased to ten, then twenty, then at least thirty each day. I was doing millipede checks every morning when I woke up, every afternoon when I returned home from work, and every evening before bed--finding and eliminating ten or twenty at a time. Constantly on the alert, I spotted them on the floor by my chair while eating breakfast, sneaking in through the doorway when I would try to relax with a book, crawling along the bathroom wall as I combed my hair.... It was rather disconcerting at times.

Thankfully, their migration has ceased (I did some research and found that they tend to swarm into basements during their migration, and, if left unchecked, could cause a mess and repeat the pattern year after year), and I see them only rarely and usually outside by now. But, during the heat of my two-month-long battle against them, I was asked to write about them as an object lesson. So here are the thoughts they provoked:

“Home at last,” I sighed, opening the door to my basement apartment. I stepped across the threshold, then hopped back, wishing I could close the door and never come back.

Millipedes speckled the floor. Crawling millipedes, probing millipedes, sleeping millipedes. They made themselves right at home, though not a one of them had ever paid rent!

If anyone had told me last year that I would live in an apartment in which fighting off millipedes, spiders, and insects was a daily activity, I would have produced an unladylike snort of disbelief. I have a tremendous fear of creatures with more than four legs. Which is, of course, the reason God has given me the opportunity to live in a place to which millipedes (note the Latin here: 1000 legs—much more than four!) are inexplicably drawn.

In the short weeks since I moved into my place, I am already noticing progress. Instead of finding ways to dispose of them from the greatest distance possible, I have reached the point where I am able to pick up most of my many-legged intruders with a tissue.

For me, this is a stepping-stone. I have long dreamed of visiting and serving in many countries around the world, but when missionaries tell me about the giant spiders and roaches and scorpions they have chased out of their homes, my enthusiasm wavers.

Now, though, I know first-hand that God will prepare me for anything He calls me to do. He’s given me the courage to dispense of hundreds of millipedes without even a shudder, and He will give me the strength I need to face any other challenge that comes my way. It is true that the only things to fear are the things I face without God by my side!