Lice, Fleas, and Snakes
January 1, 1999
I was pastoring in a small town in North Carolina. I had not been there even a year when I realized my training had missed some important issues. This first struck me when a rumor circulated that a certain family in the church had head lice.
Of course, nobody wanted to talk to them about it. But when the whispers persisted, something had to be done. I was equipped to talk to people about their sin, but I had never dug too deeply into how to approach people about lice.
I remembered that the Scriptures had spoken of lice during the plagues of Egypt, so I did a careful exegesis of the verses only to find that the more recent translations said "gnats" instead of "lice."
So my wife and I finally went to see the family and told them we'd heard they might have a lice problem, which was not actually news to them. We gave them all the practical advice we could and were very pleased at how graciously they received it. They assured us they would deal with the problem. We scratched our heads all the way home, but we felt we had done the right thing.
Freebie fleas
A couple of months later, the church was preparing a large yard sale to raise money to send two young women overseas for short-term missionary service. For several weeks, we collected anything people would donate and stored it in an unused room in the church. Unfortunately, some of the donated clothes must have come from a house that had dogs or cats. A few days before the sale, some ladies went to the room to sort everything; they were promptly attacked by hundreds of fleas and made a forced retreat.
I know only a couple places in 1 Samuel that mention anything about fleas, neither of which was of much use in this situation. I went to the store and bought some aerosol bombs and ...
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