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The night I accidentally cut a snake in half with a pair of scissors

by James Barringer  
12/20/2009 / Christian Living

When I first walk into work, I typically expect the first words out of my co-worker's mouth to be "Hello" or "Good evening." What I got last night was, "There's a snake in that box."

It seems that one of our customers had discovered a tiny snake and, feeling helpful, had ushered it into a cigarette box and brought the box to us for safekeeping. My co-worker had an intense desire to make sure the snake didn't escape, so she wrapped the cigarette box with enough scotch tape to mummify a corpse and left the whole thing for me to deal with when I arrived.

I figured the best thing to do would be to set the snake free. I grabbed a pair of scissors with which to snip the tape away, and carried the box into the parking lot. "Hang on, snake," I told it, "you're about to be free! Now you can go back to...er, whatever snakes usually do when they're not terrifying tourists, I guess." I lifted the scissors to cut the lid off the box, ready to escort the snake out of its prison and into a new life.

With my promises of freedom still ringing in its ears, the last thing that went through the snake's head was the pair of scissors. Actually, that's not true. I cut the snake in half. If you had given me a ruler I could not have cut it more perfectly in half. I could tell something was wrong when I opened the box and only saw half the snake.

"Where's the other half?" asked my co-worker, helpfully perched over my shoulder. We looked around and couldn't find it, until we looked at the scissors, and there it was, half a snake torso, stuck to the blade. Snake guts are stickier than superglue, apparently.

Half of me wanted to feel bad and the other half wanted to laugh. The second half won. It was such a terrible and absurd anti-climax that all I could do was sit there and giggle. Of course, if it was an anti-climax for me, how much more must it have been for the snake? He wanted to get out of that box; he spent hours anticipating it, and what he got was a pair of scissors through the belly.

I think there is an important spiritual lesson in this for all of us, namely that the thing we think we want might kill us - or, if not kill us, at least end up being really bad for us.

I think if we take an honest look at the things we ask for from God, we'll see that we often ask for the easier of two options, the choice that is going to involve no struggle and no growth. If we have a problem with forgiveness, we'll ask God to make other people kinder and more compassionate, rather than praying that God will help us forgive. We'll ask God for more money, instead of asking him to make us content with the money we have, and help us be able to budget wiser so we can give even more money to his work. We'll ask God to change other people, to show other people their blind spots, but when he comes to shine his spotlight on us, we cringe and try to squirm out of it.

If God were to really give us everything we asked for, we would end our lives like children. We would pray ourselves away from every ounce of pain, need, frustration, grief, and discomfort. While those things are usually considered bad, and most people would enjoy being able to skip them, skipping them would destroy us, because it's only by grappling with them, by being forced to make sense of them and lean on God to get us through them, that we become human at all.

You might compare it to a child who was offered a free pass through school. If he could petition the teacher to give him an A+ on every math test, without doing the work of struggling to learn and figure out the problems, he would bypass the difficulty, but he would graduate from school without knowing how to add. What would God gain if he let us all go through pain-free, problem-free lives? We would die and enter eternity with him without ever knowing what it really meant to have a relationship with him, to lean on him, to let him provide. Would we have a relationship with him at all, other than knowing his name and reading a few stories about him, if he gave us a life so easy that we never had to walk with him?

The things we think we want most in life are generally the things that would free us from having to rely on God. Why would God answer a prayer that would make us more independent from him, when what he really wants is dependence? He has an identity for us, a plan in mind for us, good works that he has prepared in advance for us to walk in. If we're not asking for those things, how could he possibly give us what we're asking for? If we make him choose between giving us what we think we want, and what he knows we really need, he's going to choose his purposes and his plan every time. Proverbs 19:21 explains what I'm saying: "Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails." If the plans in our heart are not the same as God's purpose, then the thing we think we want would actually destroy us.

There's one major problem with my snake story, though. The snake's desire killed it because of my error, not because the snake's desire was wrong. God, of course, never makes errors. His plan and his execution are perfect. Isaiah 48:3 says it wonderfully: "I foretold the former things long ago, my mouth announced them and I made them known; then suddenly I acted, and they came to pass." God has plans and he makes them happen. The question for us is not whether he will accidentally snip us in half, since he can do no such thing. The question for us is whether our plans match his plans. If they don't, well, his plan is going to happen anyway, and when it does, it might feel to us an awful lot like God's just snipped us in half on purpose.

That's because his plan is for him to be our God and for us to be his people. It says so right in Revelation 21:3. As long as we keep asking him for things that would make our lives easier, we're basically asking us to minimize himself, to make it so we don't really need him. But we do need him, and we need to need him. Maybe that's what we should be praying for instead.

Maybe we should also be praying that he'll keep me away from scissors.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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