Skinny and Scared

Summer Night with Lizards

One thing we have a lot of around my house, just outside old Austin town, is geckos.  Geckos, not Geicos – you know, the little nocturnal lizards that run up the walls and hang on the ceilings, looking for their next meal and trying to avoid becoming someone else’s next meal.  They are “Mediterranean Geckos” to be precise, Hemidactylus turcicus – apparently they came to Texas on shipboard from the old world some years ago.  They are cute little things, maybe six inches long for a real giant of the species, speckled brown and gray and white.  The little ones are almost transparent – you can tell if they’ve eaten recently because you can see the food in their stomachs through their little translucent tummies.  On a warm summer night, it’s not unusual to see a dozen or more hanging on the walls and ceiling of my back porch.

Anyway, the little guys frequently get inside the house.  There are much worse things to get into one’s house around here – the geckos neither bite nor sting.  But once inside, they are pretty much cut off from any sources of food or water.  You see them on the wall or the floor or the window, and you try and catch them and put them back outside where they can flourish.  Unfortunately, they are quick and I am clumsy.  They skedaddle into a crevice or underneath a piece of furniture where finding them is hopeless.  And, saving themselves from my clutches, they unknowingly condemn themselves to slow death by dehydration or starvation.  Sometimes you will see the same one over and over, getting steadily skinnier and still eluding capture and rescue.  Usually, I catch them before the end, but every once in a while you find a desiccated little corpse in some out-of-the-way place, a victim of its own clever elusiveness.

I can’t help wondering how much my own reaction to God has been like that little gecko’s reaction to me, running without comprehension from the scary hand that would rescue me.  Whenever I see one of those dried out little bodies, I remember how lucky I am – not that I was smart enough not to run, but that I was too clumsy not to get caught.