If you give a mouse a cookie, you’ve started down a slippery slope. The mouse will then want a glass of milk and a straw to sip it through. Then he will ask for a napkin and a mirror to check for a milk mustache. If you give the mouse the napkin and mirror, he’ll want scissors because in the mirror he’s seen that his shaggy hair needs a trim. Then he’ll be tired and want a story and a nap. When he wakes, he will draw a picture to hang on the refrigerator which reminds him of the milk inside, so then, of course, he’ll ask for a cookie to go with the milk.
On it goes — you, the mouse, and the cookie, spiraling down that slippery slope. Where will it stop? The desert, of course, because, you see, that mouse is a desert pocket mouse. A brownish-gray little creature you’ve seen scurrying across night-time pavements in our western deserts. A three-inch body, plus a longer tail. He’s come out of his burrow in the sandy soil along a dry gulch where he has hidden all day. But it’s night now, and he will come out for a cookie and milk.
I confess. I borrowed my mouse from Laura Joffe Numeroff, who published If You Give a Mouse a Cookie forty years ago. It’s an amusing kindergartner’s story, but to me it is also adult — about slippery slopes and “if-then” scenarios that throw you down that slope. For Mouse, a cookie is never enough.
Slippery slopes are a familiar construct to many of us. If this thing happens, then that thing will happen, and off you go, sliding down. Numeroff’s story reminds me how often I give a cookie to a mouse and slip right down into fear, uncertainty, ingratitude, shame, complaint…you name it. On I go until I plunge into a cold and desolate spiritual desert.
Don’t get me wrong. I love deserts. I have traveled to four major western deserts: Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts. Deserts are wonderful spots of land. They startle me with their beauty. Stark mountain ranges, gila monsters and sidewinders, red rock spires and swirling chutes, mesas, hoodoos, buttes with steep slopes on all sides, salt seas, mesquites, sages of all sorts, spiky cacti, and two-armed saguaro thirty feet tall. Deserts offer both tedious monotony and startling beauty. They also yield danger.
One cold night a few years ago, Bill and I drove away from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at dusk. By the time we reached US 89A, it had grown dark, a black, high desert dark in northern Arizona. We pulled onto the desolate highway and headed east toward a motel room we had reserved. Right away, we met a large truck that swished past quickly.
As best I remember, for the next 130 miles, we met no one. Bill says we did, a car or two. Maybe. I don’t know. I remember no sign of life except an occasional furry animal scurrying across the pavement in our headlights. We had no cell service. No moon. No lights to the right or left. No houses. No ranches. We had never been that way before. The dark felt cold and empty, silent except for the whirr of our tires on the asphalt. We were alone. I was frightened. The gas gauge began to reflect orange.
People get stranded and die on dark, cold nights on the high desert. Three hours later when we entered our little motel room with grimy knotty pine walls, saggy twin beds, and a yellow fly swatter, we were relieved and safe. I felt like hugging the check-in clerk.
Slippery slopes sometimes drop us down into spiritually dark territories where we feel cold and alone, afraid,
uncertain, ungrateful.
For me, it starts when I give that mouse a cookie.
In his recent book You’re Only Human, Kelly Kapic suggests we often find ourselves on slippery slopes because we do not admit our finitude — that we are finite and not God. We have limits. We have bounds, though we try to behave as if we don’t. These human limitations are God’s design and are good. Not that we should use our limitations as excuses to sin. Far from it, Kapic says. Faithfully living with finitude means we admit our needs. (Remember, our Lord has no needs.) Then we practice gratitude, humility, our need for others and, of course, our dependency on our Lord Himself.
We don’t easily admit all that — at least I don’t.
One of my most treacherous slippery slopes is how I deal with (or don’t deal with) uncertainty. I want to know. Sometimes, I think I know, or at least act like I know. When it comes to if…then scenarios, my imagination runs amok. Always toward the worst, the most dangerous. So, I give the mouse a cookie.
Jeannie, a writer I follow, tells how in late December 2021, her family lost their home, though not their lives, in the Marshall fire in Boulder, Colorado. Two people did die, more than 37,000 were evacuated, and 991 structures were destroyed. Uncertainty loomed over Jeannie’s family like a fanged monster. Should they rebuild or relocate? “So many questions.” she wrote. “I prayed constantly for God to give us direction.” Friends and family prayed, then bombarded her with,
“What are you going to do?” Her slippery slope was real.
Finally, she garnered peace from Isaiah 30:20-21: “And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction,...thine eyes shall see thy teachers…And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it....”
Jeannie began answering people’s questions with, “I don’t know yet.” That yet was powerful to Jeannie. It admitted her uncertainty but quelled her anxiety and infused hope. I don’t know yet. Her family was still unsure about the future, but she acknowledged: “I knew that if I kept seeking Jesus rather than seeking answers here, there, and everywhere, He would say, ’This is the way, walk in it.’” And He did, in His own timing.
For me, another slippery slope is complaint. I’ve never cared much for Jonah. So, recently when I restudied his book, I decided to be sympathetic to Jonah’s complaints. I couldn’t. As always, by chapter 4, I wanted to yell at him, “Stop whining! Be grateful the Lord spared you. Be grateful He relented. Be grateful for the shade.”
Then Jonah really got my goat. He smarted off to God. “I do well to be angry,” he said to God. What audacity! The Lord should have zapped him right there. I say that even though I know I am also a complainer. C. S. Lewis recently chided me in a 1941 letter to his friend, Sister Penelope: “It is a curious fact that the advice we can give to others we cannot give to ourselves.”
That’s me. I complain about complainers though I am one. I criticize Jonah and other complainers. Usually not to their faces, but I whine and give the mouse a cookie. The slope is slippery. Though things in our lives are not always good, the Lord always is.
David, who knew all about hard times, once said, “I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered my trouble; thou has known my soul in adversities” (Psalm 31:7). Paul said it, too: “Rejoice in the Lord….Let your moderation be known unto all men” (Philippians 4:4-5). Or, as Dr. Robert Picirilli translated it, “Let your sweet reasonableness be known to everyone.” Sweet reasonableness smothers criticism. Sweet reasonableness quells complaints and strengthens gratitude.
I need to stay off slippery slopes and out of spiritual deserts. I need to wait for the Lord’s guidance. I need to rejoice, be grateful, stop complaining. I need to be reasonable and NEVER give that little rat a cookie! (Sorry, I should have said that little mouse.) No! No cookie for you, little mouse!
About the Writer: Brenda Evans lives and writes in Ashland, Kentucky. You may reach her at beejayevans@windstream.net.