Jeremiah

Jeremiah

Welcome to Christianity Oasis. This is Jeremiah from our Sojourn With Luz Leigh Collection. We hope you enjoy this enlightening reading and it helps you on your own be-YOU-tiful Christian walk.

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Sojourn With Luz Leigh

Jeremiah

Written by Luz Leigh - 17 April 2009

Now this story is not about Jeremiah, the prophet, whose warnings to the nation of Judah are recorded in the Old Testament book bearing his name. Nor is it about "Jeremiah the Bullfrog," a song that was popular a few years ago.

No, this is about a lizard called Jeremiah who lived with us for many years. I can't say for certain the lizard that we saw on an almost daily basis was the same one, but it makes a good story to present it as such. The circumstances in which Jeremiah is mentioned here were true.

Let me set the stage for the story ... "Sicily ... 1945" ... no wait ... that is Sofia from the Golden Girls. Think... "Texas, the late 1950s to mid-1970s." The house in which we lived was old, and I do mean OLD, so there were gaps under the doors, some of the doors were in odd places. Like the one that led from the bathroom to a screened back porch; there was also a door to the bedroom from the bathroom.

I grew up in that house so many things that were strange to others were normal to me. Early in our marriage, one morning my sweet husband was perched on his throne when he noticed a lizard making his way across the bathroom floor. He watched as the lizard crawled into the bathroom out of sight, only to re-appear a few minutes later, retracing his steps to the outside door and disappear. My husband was not a squeamish person so he made no mention of the incident ... until the same thing happened the next morning. When he told me about it, I assured him that it was only Jeremiah coming in for a drink of water. You see, in the old house the faucet in the bathtub leaked just enough that a small amount of water was always standing around the drain. Being intelligent, Jeremiah came there for his water.

Sometimes Jeremiah would venture into other parts of the house, but mostly he stayed out of sight. He loved to hide out in the house plants that I had managed to keep alive. Apparently when we moved to our new home, Jeremiah hitched a ride on one of those plants, unknown to us. A few days after we were settled in the new house, I noticed Jeremiah was still with us. It became his habit to jump from the ivy plant located on the corner table in the living room to the back of my husband's recliner, then occasionally make his way to other parts of the house. Most of the time one could find old Jeremiah in his domain ... the ivy plant.

In order to make my life a little easier, my husband hired a lady to come to our home once a week to do some serious house cleaning. With three children and two busy adults, housekeeping was not high on our priorities of things to be done.

Jeremiah was not a social butterfly so he was rarely seen by anyone outside the family. However, I suppose after the cleaning lady had been coming for a couple of months, he decided she was to be trusted, so he hopped from the ivy plant to the recliner. Innocent little thing was just sitting there overseeing the woman's actions, not making a sound. But, oh my! The woman spied him, took his presence as a threat to her life and promptly knocked him to the floor with her broom and ... oh it's so hard to tell this ... stepped on Jeremiah with her big ugly foot. Jeremiah expired, not peacefully as he had lived, but in terrible agony.

The lady made no mention to me about the demise of our pet and only that afternoon when I saw his lifeless little body lying on the ground near the back door, did I learn of his death. I fired the cleaning lady! She could not understand why I was so upset over the death of a "stupid lizard" (her words). Jeremiah was not stupid; he just made a mistake of trusting someone who did not see him as a pet, but as a pest. As long as Jeremiah was among the immediate family members, he was safe. My husband and the children were not as upset over the death of Jeremiah as I was. But they did not like the manner in which the lizard was killed. The children kept asking me, "Why didn't she just toss him outside if she didn't like him?" Good question.

The moral of the story is "Don't show your face among people you can't trust."

Jeremiah the prophet did not hide from the people to whom he was preaching God's message. In the first chapter of Jeremiah we find words of the Lord as he was calling the prophet to service: "Do not say I am only a child. You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them for I am with you and will rescue you." For his efforts to follow God's directions, Jeremiah was persecuted through imprisonment, beatings and even excommunication from the temple. But he never gave up. Although he preached about the Lord's strong judgment to come against Judah, he also gave hope of blessings to come if that nation would return to the Lord.

The next time you see a lizard, will you think about Jeremiah? Both our pet and the prophet?

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