Our cat Milo, who sometimes has ticks, but not very often, and who is nicer to look at than an actual tick, which is pretty gross.
My husband found a tick crawling on my son this morning.
He immediately dispatched it with a glass of soapy water. We read somewhere that this is a good way to deal with ticks, which we generally (thankfully) find on the dog, not on each other. You need to add the soap, because otherwise they can crawl out and wander off again, searching for a new victim. Apparently, ticks are very resilient.
I am grateful that this tick was still crawling, that my husband saw it. I am thankful that it didn’t attach, that we didn’t discover it hours or days later, after it was fat and full of blood. I know that there are ticks aplenty outside right now. Our sweet pets wander out into tall weeds and the ubiquitous, evil vinca, where the ticks love to lurk. Both Biscuit the dog and Milo the fat cat have their monthly tick treatments, but occasionally the ticks fail to attach to them, where they would die, and make it onto one of us instead.
Today, though? The tick was taken care of.
It makes me wonder how often in our ordinary days we narrowly avert disaster and don’t even know it. How many times do ticks fall off before we realize they are there? How many auto accidents do we avoid because we are a few minutes late?
How many small annoyances (the spam phone call, the long line at the check out, the train at the railroad crossing) keep us from unknown harm?
How many mining shafts open up unexpectedly but nobody is hurt because they appear in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping? (New to this blog? Read my earlier blog about the mine shaft here.)
So much grace carries us through our days. This grace is all around us; it is at the heart of our “Christ soaked world,” says one of my favorite people, Richard Rohr. And on this cold, rainy, gray May afternoon, I remind myself that this grace is true and real and dependable even when the news is terrible and it seems like hope might just be about gone. It’s not gone. It’s what I have to believe. Though sometimes I confess that my unbelief is winning. Which is why it’s good when a tick shows up in the morning to help me remember.
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