Prayer and pest control

Our house was completely overrun with fleas one year. I tried everything I could think of to handle the problem. Sprays, bombs, powders, baths, liquid products, collars, and finally a professional exterminator... nothing helped. Funny thing was, neither the dog nor the cats seemed too bothered.  It was my family that was being bitten.

I struggled for months trying different approaches to eliminate the problem, only to have the situation worsen. Then it occurred to me that I had tried everything except prayer to solve this problem. I turned to the Bible to find some direction for my prayer and came across an interesting story. It involved a snake infestation.

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_Some time after crossing the Red Sea and escaping from Egypt, Moses and the children of Israel were confronted with an invasion of poisonous snakes in their camp. Many people were bitten and died as a result. We are told in the book of Numbers that Moses prayed for the people.

When he prayed, he heard an instruction from God, "Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live."

Moses followed that instruction by making a brass serpent and putting it on a pole in the middle of the camp. Those who were bitten, when they looked at the brass serpent, were healed of the poison. (See Numbers 21:4-9)

Was this some form of magic? Or did it illustrate a spiritual Principle of pest control?

I turned to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, to find the answer. Doing a little research on serpents, I found this:

"All of God's creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible. A realization of this grand verity was a source of strength to the ancient worthies...The serpent of God's creating is neither subtle nor poisonous, but is a wise idea, charming in its adroitness, for Love's ideas are subject to the Mind which forms them, — the power which changeth the serpent into a staff." (pps.514,515)

The serpent of God's creating..." Could this be what the brass serpent represented? Was Moses helping the people to realize that God is not the cause or creator of pain, sickness and death, by lifting up a reminder that every divine God-caused idea is obedient to the Love that creates it?

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This is Susie. A very sweet snake.

_This idea fascinated me and fueled my prayers. I thought about God as the perfect Creator of a perfect and good creation. I thought about all the "creeping things" referred to in Genesis as God-created and deemed to be very good also. I thought about the divine nature of each individual creature in creation. Not one can stray from the original design of the creator.

Then I thought about the flea. If a flea truly exists, it has to be spiritual, harmless, useful, indestructible. It can't feed off of another divine idea (a dog, a cat, or anyone's ankles), but it must fed by and is subject to God, Love, its true Source. 

The closer I looked at the possibility of a divine idea of flea, I realized that if it exists, it is a good thing and would be welcome in my home. But this idea of a home overrun with multiple horrible biting creatures was a lie about God and his good creation. A parasitic pest is not a God-caused creation.  It is an illusion. I saw that the lie and its illusory evidence of bad kind of flea had to go.

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_This prayer helped me understand better what God is and does. And a spiritual understanding of God annihilates any false evidence resulting from a mistaken view of God's creation.

To recap:
1) I saw God as the perfect Creator, Love.
2) I saw the creation as consistent with Love and expressing only love.
3) I welcomed the divine idea in my home.
4) I rejected the illusion, seeing that it has neither control over nor a place in my home.
5) I realized that this spiritual understanding was fully capable of correcting the illusion and eliminating the infestation.
6) I rejoiced in this prayer, because it gave me a really cool new view of God's creation and expanded the borders of my affection to embrace all that is good and beautiful in a flea.

The next morning, the house was clean. No more fleas. Not on the cats, not on the dog and not on us. 

Was the divine idea flea still being expressed by God somewhere in the house? I don't know.  All I can say is that the biting, pestering illusion of a zillion fleas disappeared as soon as the true idea was held up before my thought in prayer.

Science and Health tells us, "Spirit blesses the multiplication of its own pure and perfect ideas... Their spiritual nature is discerned only through the spiritual senses. Mortal mind inverts the true likeness, and confers animal names and natures upon its own misconceptions."

Here is where spiritual sense, revealed through prayer, corrects the mistake.  Prayer holds up the true idea, that is otherwise inverted by a mortal sense of things.  It brings out the divine nature of all that really exists.

We don't have to put up with pests. We can exterminate the belief of an infestation of evil through the prayer that leads to an understanding of the true creation - in which every creature and element fulfills its holy purpose and is very good.

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