We have had some adventures with wildlife since we moved here 20 months ago. We saw our first black squirrel here, and then another one the next year. Last summer, my dog, Eli, and I came upon a family of beavers living in Paint Creek just off the trail behind Kroger—about a block from our house in the middle of town. Not long after that Danielle, during the time when we didn’t have a back fence, called me at the church office and said, “There’s a beaver in the backyard.” Well, my wife is good at a lot of things, but zoology isn’t necessarily one of them. It was a muskrat, a good sized one at that, but it eventually moved on. Not long after that Eli and I were on a walk on Temple Street. It was dark, but he saw something under a bush so he dove under the bush, practically dragging me in with him. When he came out from under the bush he had a black cat in his mouth. Oh wait, I thought. That cat has a white stripe down its back. The skunk sprayed my feet (I was wearing flip flops) and it sprayed all over Eli, including inside his mouth. Needless to say, Eli let go of the skunk as soon as he could. Then it wasn’t too long after that that Danielle woke me up in the middle of the night saying, “Everett, there’s a bird in the room. Get it out.” Then she put her face under the covers. The instant I opened my eyes, I knew that was no bird. I’ll give Danielle the benefit of the doubt on this one, though, because she’s blind as… well, a bat when she doesn’t have her glasses on. A few minutes later the bat got itself trapped in our narrow back stairway and our heroic old cat Romy (a 13-year-old orange tabby of about 17 pounds) jumped into the air and swatted it down, injuring it. I came in as the cleanup crew and threw it out in the alley trashcan. Romy’s heroics that night shall be remembered for generations in the words of epic poems written by bards that travel the world to sing of his victorious exploits.
All of that happened in our first twelve months here. But all had been quiet for the past several months… until Tuesday night.
Tuesday night was the all-important night before the first day of school for Josselyn (daycare/preschool at the Methodist Church), Wyatt (2nd Grade), and Danielle (elementary reading intervention aide). My sinuses were full and pounding and I couldn’t fall asleep. So at 11 o’clock or so I got out of bed and moved onto the couch in our spare bedroom, what we call “The Wii Room” because all that usually happens in there is that Wyatt plays video games on his Wii. I read until about midnight, then turned off the lights and fell asleep… for a few hours at least. At about 4 am I hear a loud flapping not far from my face. I started awake to see a bat within a foot of my face. It is bouncing off the large plate glass window right above the couch on which I was lying. A very unholy word came out of my mouth and I covered myself up with the quilt. As I rolled onto the floor I tried to pull up in my brain all the action movies I’d ever watched to figure out what might be my next move. I heard a meow and saw that old Romy the Bat Slayer was tracking the bat. I tracked Romy’s eyes to keep track of the bat’s flight patterns. I watched as Romy’s eyes turned toward the room in which Danielle was sleeping. I thought, “I’ve got to get in there.” But then, much to my surprise I saw Danielle standing in her doorway, presumably returning from the restroom. “Get down!” I yelled.
“What?” she shot back, blearily.
“Get on the floor! Now!”
She continued to stand there. “Why?”
“Because there’s a big-@#%* bat flying around in our room!” She hit the floor in a hurry. “Get in the Wii Room and shut the door. I’ll deal with this,” I said, my words oozing with chivalry. She shut the door just as the bat flew out of our room and into the hallway. Thankfully the kids’ doors were closed. I shut our bedroom door to make sure it couldn’t get back in there. It flew downstairs and started circling the living room. Romy the Bat Slayer, who can’t go downstairs because of an old feud that apparently exists between cats and dogs, stood on the stairs and watched it dizzily. I looked down and saw the dog, who was lying on the couch, looking up in the air, but seeming to be rather uninterested. He put his head back down and closed his eyes. When our dog is a little older he would be a great candidate to play the role of a sleeping dog on the porch of a small town sheriff’s office. I went down the backstairs, wrapped up in a quilt, grabbed a broom, and headed for the living room. This was not the best place to do battle—the ceilings are too high and there is no way to block it off from the rest of the house, but I had to meet the enemy on the enemy’s terms. However, when I went in there it was nowhere to be found. I turned on all the lights and looked around. Nothing.
I assumed the bat had flown back upstairs so I went up, still wrapped in the quilt to where only my face and my hand, which was wielding a broom, were showing. As I made it to the top of the stairs, Wyatt’s door opened and he stood there petrified at the sight of a ghost holding a broom. “What’s happening?!” he yelled.
“There’s a bat in the house,” I said, as I dropped the quilt and spoke as calmly as I could. He looked up toward the ceiling.
“But I really need to pee!” he cried out. I had to agree to stand beside him at the toilet as a guard while he went to the bathroom. He then got under the quilt with me and I escorted him to our bedroom, where he crawled in with Danielle. I shut the door behind me and did another sweep of the house. Nothing. At about 6:15 am I finally fell back to sleep. My alarm went off at 7. Several times throughout the day, I searched for the bat. Still nothing.
I was exhausted last night. I’d come off of two nights of little sleep (the first because of allergies) so I took some Benadryl to help with the allergies and to help me fall asleep. I was in bed reading by 9:15 pm. The kids were already asleep behind closed doors and Danielle was downstairs watching TV. After about twenty minutes of reading the Benadryl had kicked in, so I put my book down and was about to reach over to turn off the lamp when I heard, “Everett! Everett! The bat is in the living room!” Before I could even get out of bed, the bat flew through our bedroom doorway, missing me by just a foot or two. Even though I was drugged, I thought fast enough to crawl out into the hallway and shut the door behind me. The bat was trapped in our bedroom and now I had time to come up with a plan, put on better armor than a quilt, find the right weapons, and locate my trusty sidekick, Romy the Bat Slayer.
I came downstairs and briefed Danielle, who was on the couch hiding under a child’s size blanket that said, “Sports All-Star” on it. I put on some flannel pants, my tennis shoes, a fleece jacket, leather gloves, a ski mask, and Danielle’s sunglasses (the big bug-eye sort of glasses). I was fully armored. I went out to the garage and it was like the cornucopia of weapons in the Hunger Games. I grabbed Wyatt’s children’s fishing net (too small really) and as I was leaving the garage I decided to grab the leaf rake. When I came back in the house I decided I could use a shield (Wyatt and I had just watched Captain America on Monday). I was ready for battle looking like a cross between a yard landscaper and a ninja. Before I could go upstairs, Danielle made me pose for a picture for her to post on her Facebook page. I went upstairs to find Romy the Bat Slayer sitting just outside our bedroom door. The old warrior was ready for battle. I briefed him on the plan. “Okay Romy. I’m going to send you in first. You’re going to track the enemy. I’ll army crawl in and I’ll be able to track the bat by watching you. I’ll make my way across the room, open the window, and then the bat will fly out. It’s as easy as that." He used his paw to make the sign of the cross on my forehead, we bowed our heads in prayer and he gave me a letter (signed with a paw print) to send to his mother if he didn’t come back alive (okay, maybe that last sentence didn’t happen).
I opened the door enough to let Romy in, then I shut it again to make sure the bat didn’t get out. I was still out in the hallway. I’m a little bigger than Romy so I was afraid I wouldn’t quite get in the door without letting the bat out. Finally, I just yelled out “Geronimo!” (in my head) and dove into the room, slamming the door behind me. Now my trusty steed (by that I mean cat) and I were in the cave (bedroom) with our nemesis, the great dragon (bat). Beneath the Ohio State stadium cushion, I had my own little phalynx formation going. I yelled out to Romy, “Give me some coordinates!” I actually did yell that to my cat. I crawled across the bedroom and opened the window and screen. All I’ve got to do now is wait for it to fly out, I thought. No problem, right?
Well, I figured out that the window was lower than the bat’s flight pattern. Romy was on top of the bed, jumping as high as he could and swiping at the bat. He was missing it by five feet or more. Romy the Bat Slayer isn’t going to be able to handle this one, I realized. And the window plan isn’t going to work. To top it off, Romy saw the window was open and found that very interesting. Seeing as I didn’t want my cat to jump out of the second story window, I had to shut it. I wasn’t going to be able to handle this in the humane Tibetan Buddhist kind of way. A scene from the classic 80’s post-apocalyptic film Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome entered my mind. I could see Tina Turner standing above the two gladiators yelling out, “Two men enter. One man leaves.” There was going to be no retreat, no peace treaty. It was either me or the bat.
In that moment, I dropped my shield a little and got my first good look at the bat. Immediately, I wished I hadn’t done that. This one was not like the bat the year before. This one was big. It was like the size of Dracula when he is only halfway through changing from a vampire into a bat. It was big enough to terrorize a medieval village and carry off small children to the castle of an evil wizard. It surely returned each morning to a lair filled with the bones of cattle, horses, and bounty hunters. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure it was a bat for a moment there. I’d found the world’s last pterodactyl. It was like the Loch Ness Monster had grown wings. It was that big and it was starting to get ticked off. As I came face to face with this Jurassic predator, Danielle was downstairs on the couch posting about it on Facebook.
Having just watched Captain America, I decided to fling my shield at the bat. I figured it would be like in the movie. The shield would hit my enemy and then the shield would bounce off the wall and return to me. Crouched down below the flight level, I flung the shield. It missed the bat by two feet and landed on the other side of the bed. I was exposed. It was now or never. As I stood to my feet, the yawps of the great armies of the past filled my ears. Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, George Washington, and George Patton all thought to themselves, “If only I could have been more like him.” Shakespeare called out to me, "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." In that moment, the spirits of Japanese Samurais, Chinese Kung Fu Monks, the Knights Templar, Aztec Warriors, and the 300 Greeks at Thermopylae gathered in that bedroom. Garnering their strength I swung the rake and in a single stroke (after four or five strokes before that single stroke) I connected with the prehistoric beast and it fell to the carpet vanquished. Smoke rose from the body as I scooped it up in Wyatt’s bright orange fishing net, opened the window, and pushed it off the cliff into the great abyss (down into the side yard). As I closed the window, the villagers came out of their homes and thanked me for saving their families and farms. They began the preparations for a feast of venison and quail in the chieftain’s mead hall, and the bards began to add to the epic poem that tells of the legend of Romy the Bat Slayer and his master Everett the Brave. Everyone would sleep safely in the Miller house that night.
Okay, since this is a pastor’s blog, I usually try to have some sort of spiritual lesson involved. However, this week I’m not sure there’s any spiritual lesson in this whatsoever. I guess this story is a little bit about what it means to be a man. Strangely enough, feminism suddenly disappears when there’s a bat flying around your bedroom in the middle of the night. There’s certainly a lot more to being a man than that though. Maybe this is the spiritual lesson: for everything there is a time and a season… a time for leaving bats alone so they can rid your neighborhood of mosquitoes and a time to hit a bat with a rake and throw it out the window. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible though. How about this: you just spent the past ten minutes reading this post and hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you laughed. Hopefully you didn’t worry or fret about your life during those ten minutes. Maybe that’s the spiritual lesson—you should be willing to stop and have a good laugh every now and then. I read another pastor’s blog recently that ended with these words, “1 Corinthians 10:31 reads, “'So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God’… Simply enjoying life as a redeemed human who puts God first glorifies God. God takes pleasure when we enjoy ourselves. Why complicate it?”
I like that. Why complicate it? I hope you had fun reading this. I certainly had fun writing it, even if I didn’t have fun living it. May you have a blessed week.
In service to the Gospel,
Pastor Everett.
