Lutheran Squirrel

We have had a squirrel nesting above our school’s 3rd grade classroom for a while. The kids could hear him walking around on the ceiling tiles. Last week he became very bold and went downstairs into the Preschool classroom in the basement. He crawled through an open ceiling tile and made a mess in the room. Preschool was canceled for two days for our teacher to clean up the mess the squirrel made on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

Over the weekend the squirrel got into the school office and chewed up the bottom of the wooden door to the storage room in the office.

On Sunday morning I was in the school basement where the cafeteria is and where I teach Sunday morning Bible study. It was 20 minutes before church and I was preparing everything for class. I walked over to the piano to get a hymnal. There is a large red barn that the After Care uses that sits on top of the piano. When I approached the piano, something in the barn moved. I looked in the barn window and saw two little beady squirrel eyes looking back at me.

I ran upstairs to get our intrepid ushers. One usher walked up to the barn with cardboard in each hand and covered each opening on either side of the barn. The squirrel was trapped! The usher carried the barn outside and the other usher was going to drive the squirrel a few miles away and let it go. The squirrel had other ideas. He made a daring break for it and broke through the cardboard “doorway.”

Sadly, the squirrel has avoided all of our traps. It sits in the tree and mocks us.

I joked on Sunday morning that while the squirrel was trapped in the barn I should have gotten some water and baptized and confirmed it. Then we wouldn’t see it again. (I'm just kidding.)

That squirrel has been living in the school long enough that it has heard lots of God’s Word. By now it is probably a very Lutheran squirrel. Like us - a saint but still a whole lof of sinner.