I left my workbag on the bedroom floor from Friday night to Monday morning. I took out my computer to do a little work but left a bar of chocolate ready for the long bus ride home sometime this week.
When I went to pack for work yesterday morning it became apparent that while I had ignored my bag all weekend, not everyone else in the house had. The evidence was in the shredded chocolate wrapper. It was in the tiny teeth marks in the nibbled chocolate. And most of all it was in the mouse poo left by the mouse who’d been feasting at my expense.
Now, I have no particular grudge against mice. But I don’t like sharing my food with them. I don’t like them scuttling uninvited around my bedroom. I don’t like them in my space.
Of course, people are not mice and I’m much more tolerant of people. Except (like most of us, I reckon) when I’m not. In recent months one man has started to arrive a couple of minutes ahead of me to get the 6am bus to Oxford on Friday mornings. And he sits in my spot. Now my spot is my spot. It’s mine. It always has been. It’s my territory. Sharing my spot makes me mad. And Friday Guy takes my spot. Nothing good can come of it.
Except that maybe it can. The bible tells the story of Ruth, who was a foreigner, a Moabite woman who married an Israelite man. Now the Israelites were pretty clear about sharing their space with Moabites. They didn’t do it. ‘No Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord, even in the tenth generation’ they were taught. But Ruth, by the example of her steadfastness and courage and the love she showed to her adopted family not only entered ‘the assembly of the Lord’ but became the great-grandmother of David the greatest of all Israel’s kings.
So when I start hunting down the Bag Mouse, or getting antsy about Friday Guy, or, more seriously, worrying about the shifting tides of populations moving around the world driven by violence, fear, or desperate economic necessity, I’ll think of Ruth and the grace she brought to the people in whose country she was a refugee. And I’ll try to remember that my space is not mine but ours – and that it’s in our shared spaces that we experience our shared humanity with all its limitless potential.
The mouse never came back to the bedroom after this. At least I don’t think so. Also, Friday Guy stopped taking the bus. And my eldest, Miriam, taught me more about Ruth from her lofty vantage point as an Old Testament scholar.