On a trip to West Virginia, my family and I took a tour of an old coal mine and town that have been turned into a museum.  Our tour of the underground mine was done by a former miner.  He showed the progression of mining from the early days when a candle on the front of a helmet provided light and a pick harvested the coal to the machines they use today.

Seeing a vein of coal and knowing where to blast and where to shore up as the coal is removed takes skill and nerve but there were a lot of other things I had never considered.  

The men in the mine usually had a place where they left their lunches, an area where it was high enough to stand up.  They didn’t bring their lunches in plastic lunch boxes.  They were metal because they weren’t the only ones in the mines and rats eat through plastic.  Before we could be properly horrified over the rats that would eat through a plastic lunch box, the miner said that every miner makes friends with the rats.

If you have any leftovers or a burnt part of a biscuit or roll, you take it off and throw it to the rats.  As annoying or filthy as the rats might be, every miner wants to see them in the mine, and every miner keeps an eye out for any strange movement among the rats.  

Even with the growth of technology and monitoring, the rats can smell a gas pocket better than the sensors, they can hear the rumble of the earth long before a cave in and so if a miner sees a group of rats start to move, the smart miner will follow without wondering where they are going, he just follows them to safety and then looks back to see what he’s missed.

I’ve been wondering what the “rats” in my life are.  What are the things that have been annoying, uncomfortable and sometimes just plain vermin-like in my life that have been a blessing and led me closer to safety.  As I have thought, I have felt to be grateful for some of the most long running difficulties of my life, the kind that are always present and aren’t going to go away and which I can do very little about.  But perhaps it is the very long term nature of their presence that has opened my heart, given me more compassion, caused me to focus and see more as the Savior sees and therefore, led me closer to safety.  As the miner conveyed, only the foolish would wish the rats away.