All Creatures Great and Small

We read in the scriptures that God is aware of everything, even the fall of a sparrow. We might think this is just an expression, but it can be taken literally as well. With everything we’ve gone through over the last few months with my daughter’s pets, we’ve become a little hyper-vigilant about her current pet, a little golden hamster named Honeysuckle, and this week I’ve had the chance to see firsthand just how much the Lord does watch over His creatures.

A couple of weeks ago, we discovered a sore on the bottom of Honeysuckle’s paw. I blogged about it at the time, and you can click here to read how it came to be and the resolution of that medical condition, as well as finding out just how awesome I am at putting hamsters to sleep. The sore was quite large and infected, and we’ve been concerned that she might develop another, as we didn’t know how she became injured in the first place.

Last week, my daughter brought the hamster to me and showed me a speck of dried blood on the bottom of her paw. We’ve had so many incidents with pets, and my daughter is rather a drama queen anyway, that I felt as though I had reached the end of my rope. I sent a little prayer heavenward, asking the Lord to please solve the problem of the hamster’s foot. I just couldn’t handle it. I received the impression to have my daughter remove the hamster’s wheel from her cage.

The next day, my daughter told me that the hamster had really been bored the night before, and had started gnawing on the bars of the cage, so she put the wheel back in. Sure enough, the foot was bleeding again. I asked my daughter to take the wheel out of the cage until further notice.

I was having company come into town and I had a list of a million things to do, so I told my daughter I would look at the wheel when I had a minute. Well, a few days went by, and I finally found the time to investigate. Sure enough, one place on the wheel was sharp and pointed, and I told my daughter to throw it in the trash. Two days after that, Honeysuckle’s paw was completely healed.

When you buy a piece of equipment from a pet store, you expect it to be in safe, usable condition, and I had not automatically thought to check the wheel for hazards. I had thought that the sores were caused by some kind of bacteria, and so we’d been washing the cage regularly with hot water and bleach, as instructed at the store. I do not believe I would have hit upon the answer of a defective wheel without asking the Lord for His advice.

He does care. He cares about the hamsters and the mice and the rats and the bugs and the fleas. I don’t know if He provided the answer for the hamster’s sake or for my daughter’s, and it really doesn’t matter. But her beloved hamster is healthy again because He took the time to answer a brief little prayer. And if He’ll do that for a scratch on a hamster’s paw, how much more will He do that when we truly need His help with the big stuff?

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