Strange occurances are not uncommon in our lives for Jesus, but nothing as strange as this had ever happened to us before!

In the floor of our camper there is a secret compartment covered by a trap door, that was originally meant for storing/hiding valuables. But since it wasn’t all that secure, we decided to just keep an envelope with two 100 Swiss franc notes in it to be used as “bait money” to give to a thief  in case we were ever in the process of being robbed. I would occasionally check on it, and it was always there undisturbed.

When fall arrived and temperatures dropped, we stopped using the camper and left it parked just outside our house. Little did we know that not soon after, some field mice had decided that it would be a nice warm place to take up residence for the winter. We had no idea they were there until one day I went to look for something in the camper, and saw the tell-tale sign of tiny bits of chewed up paper falling out of a lower drawer. Realizing that we had mice, I set some traps and caught them that same night. The next morning I began to dig deeper, as I needed to find their nest. I found their source of food and where they had been collecting material for their bedding, but as hard as I tried, I could not find the actual nest.

Then I thought I’d better look in the secret compartment. The nest was not there, but neither was the envelope of money! Where could it have gone? Could the mice have actually “taken the bait”? There was a small slit in the side of the compartment that led under the floor. Apparently our furry intruders had somehow crawled through the slit, seen the envelope, and dragged it back through the slit to an undisclosed location under the floorboards.

My first thought was “Oh, no!” If they had built their nest under the floor, it would be impossible to remove it without huge damage and expense. But there was in the floor a small step that had a plastic grate in front of it. I had never gotten down to see what was behind that grate, but when I took a flashlight and looked, I could see the nest! And since it was thankfully just centimeters away, I could easily remove the grate and pull out the pile of chewed up paper and other items (including all the the pellets that they leave everywhere).

Looking deeper up under the floor, I could see the half-chewed up envelope and managed to pull it out, but the money was not there! Neither did I see any tell-tale blue strips that would have shown that the notes had been chewed up. So, what had happened to the money? After pulling out most of the bedding, I could see even further back up under the floor, and there they were! Both of the 100 Swiss franc notes were in pristine condition, standing up neatly along the side of the compartment. It was almost as if the mice had chosen to put them up like  paintings on their walls!

Now skeptics might deduce that the Swiss had wisely treated their bank notes with some sort of poisonous substance that would inhibit rodents from chewing on them. But we prefer to believe our uninvited visitors simply enjoyed those “pretty pictures” so much that they preferred to keep them as decorations, and used other material for their bedding. Whatever the truth, we are counting this as one of the oddest and funniest  things we have ever experienced.