Slug Trails

In the house my mother lived in before she moved into her sheltered housing flat was the end house on a terraced row. It had the only backyard that was not covered in concrete or paving slabs. There wasn’t any grass, just lots of rose bushes.

I suppose it is inevitable that with a proper garden you get beetles and spiders, but it was the slugs that did me in. If the slugs had stuck to the garden we could probably have co-existed without much fuss. Somehow or other the slugs found their way into the house. Every morning there were slug trails in erratic patterns around the carpet under the dining table. They were sticky, slimy and silvery and always there in the morning.

One evening, late in the year, the phone rang. I was in the kitchen at the time and walked through the living room to pick up the receiver. Just because the slug trails are there in the morning, does not mean that the slugs make them in the morning! This lesson I learned as I stepped onto a slug. Sad to say, I wasn’t wearing shoes at the time and the squashed slug oozed between my toes. I was hopping round the room, screaming down the phone to my sister, “Ooh! Ooh! Oh no! Arrgh! It is gross! Yuk! Yuk!” It was very unpleasant!

This morning brought back those unpleasant memories! There was a slug trail in the hall way! The slug had kindly kept its ramblings to near the back door. A silvery trail of slime and goo marked its path. We have had things done to the garden over the last few weeks. I traced the slug trail back to a bin that my husband had been using to collect bits of a fir tree in as he was hacking at the branches. We are taking down a number of the trees. The slug had hitched a ride and then began exploring!

Spotting the slug trail is an easy thing. It stands out. In the book of Genesis, the path that Abraham took through the land of Israel was also easy to spot. Everywhere that Abraham stopped, he built an altar. Sometimes he went back to places where he had been before and worshipped there.

In the New Testament, when John the Baptist was imprisoned, he wanted to know whether Jesus really was the man who would come after him. He sent his disciples to find out. The path that Jesus walked was clear. The lame walked, the dumb spoke, demons were cast out and people were raised from the dead. Jesus left behind him a clear trail of changed, or challenged, people.

It just makes me wonder what kind of a trail I am leaving for others to follow! Do I want people to walk in my path? Are the words that I speak much like the unpleasant slug that gets squashed between the toes? Or do I leave a trails that demonstrates my worship of God, and my care for the people He loves?