crawling with fleas

A book that frightens, amazes, exhorts, rebukes, and encourages me is The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. When we were kids, we would all pile on Mom and Dad's bed, and Mom would read it out loud. Some passages, when I read them today, I read with Mom's voice in my ears. There are several passages that are more vivid to me than others. This is one:

One evening I got back to the barracks late from a wood-gathering foray outside the walls. A light snow lay on the ground and it was hard to find the sticks and twigs with which a small stove was kept going in each room. Betsie was waiting for me, as always, so that we could wait through the food line together. Her eyes were twinkling.

"You're looking extraordinarily pleased with yourself," I told her.
"You know we've never understood why we had so much freedom in the big room," she said. "Well--I've found out."

That afternoon, she said, there'd been confusion in her knitting group about sock sizes and they'd asked the supervisor to come and settle it.

"But she wouldn't. She wouldn't step through the door and neither would the guards. And you know why?"

Betsie could not keep the triumph from her voice: "Because of the fleas! That's what she said, 'That place is crawling with fleas!'"

My mind rushed back to our first hour in this place. I remembered Betsie's bowed head, remembered her thanks to God for creatures I could see no use for."

Corrie ten Boom, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1971), 207-208

And what did they need the freedom for? To preach the Gospel. God will have His glory known, and He uses fleas in the middle of a Nazi concentration camp to do it! And so I ask myself, what are the fleas in my life that I ought to be thanking God for instead of moaning and writhing over?