I awoke Saturday morning to find a lizard in my bathtub. He was a refugee from last week’s ice storm in Eastern Ontario and arrived at our house on Friday night in need of warmth and refreshment. The storm took out several heavy limbs from one of our neighbour’s trees, leaving him with a flattened shed and more than a few downed power lines. Apparently Fred and his children were welcome at Grandpa’s house to wait it out, but for his son’s precious pet—Iggy the Iguana—there was no room at the inn. “We need to be good neighbours” my husband whispered to me, as he brought the amphibian into our house.
We put Iggy in the tub of our small upstairs bathroom because it is our warmest most humid room. My husband dialled up the thermostat a few degrees and I brought Sir Iggy a small buffet of diced banana and chopped spinach. Whenever one of us approached the tub Iggy would puff up his little lizard body, swing his tail back and forth, and open his mouth wide and stick out his tongue. I’ve never had the slightest desire to own an exotic pet and Iggy’s aggressive posturing only served to strengthen my resolve that creatures like him belong in their natural habitat.
I spent most of the weekend avoiding the upstairs bathroom but on Saturday night I needed to fix myself up for a date with my husband and that’s where all of my beautification tools are stored. While putting my rollers in, I accidentally knocked a tube of toothpaste off the bathroom sink and the resulting thud—about what a small lizard might sound like if it landed on a pine plank floor—sent me screaming hysterically down the upstairs hallway. Truth be told, between the head full of rollers and the shrieking he was probably more scared of me than I was of him.
I slept with one eye open most of that night with every bump from the bathroom leaving me tossing and turning, wondering if the lizard was on the loose. By Sunday afternoon, when the lights in the house across the street finally came back on and Iggy was shepherded back home to his heat lamp and his tank, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I know Iguanas are God’s creatures too but their “ick factor” is extremely high and I couldn’t wait for him to go home.
After the tub had been rinsed out and it was safe for a weekend soak and a glass of Merlot, I wondered about Iggy as a metaphor for the challenges of welcoming strangers, particularly those that aren’t that easy to welcome. If he had been a cat or dog—or some cute, cuddly creature—how much more enjoyable our surprise weekend guest would have been, how easy it would have been to have the little critter around.
I like to think of myself as a generous person but the truth is I tend to gravitate towards helping those who are easiest to help. Welcoming the stranger who is indeed strange—or odd or difficult—that’s when the generosity muscles get a meaningful workout, that’s when “loving my neighbour” demands something much bigger than mere social graces—that’s when the real spiritual challenge and the call to God’s mission truly begins.
