Noah’s Fleas
The story of Noah’s ark is one of the first Bible stories parents often share with their kids. At young ages kids will often be taught to mimic the animal sounds. When mom or dad points to the tiger a child will often make a roar. For the cows kids will moo, ducks quack, chickens cluck, dogs bark, and cats meow.
The story wouldn’t be complete without explaining that the reason for the flood was the people’s wickedness and how Noah pleaded with them to repent and they would not listen. But the way I tell it that’s only part of the story.
Wicked people generally aren’t nice to one another, and they’re certainly not nice to animals. Seeing this Noah started the very first animal shelter in his area and hoped to fund it with donations from those within the community.
Unfortunately wicked people don’t donate to charity so Noah after some marketing research decided to turn his animal shelter into a zoo, charge a modest fee so he’d be able to make ends meet with regards to food costs and other expenses.
The plan worked pretty well. His kids helped with zoo construction and got pretty good at making fences and shelters for the animals. The local people did patron the zoo and Noah encouraged them to fill out his customer surveys at the end of their visit.
One of the first comments he got was regarding the fleas. You see, the cats, dogs, cows, giraffes, beavers, platypuses, and wolves all had fleas and would spend a considerable amount of time scratching themselves. The customer surveys were NOT good and soon business was really looking bad. Repeat business was low because no one wanted to go to the zoo and watch the animals do nothing more than scratch themselves.
It was about this time when things were looking pretty down that Noah was told to quit his full time job of managing and marketing the zoo and to start building an ark. It took a lot of faith. After all, there was no marketing research on the need for an ark within the community.
Noah built it anyway. Once again the kids helped. By this time the whole family was pretty good at building things with wood and the land that was going to be phase three of zoo development (plans included a rough roller coaster) was large enough to accommodate ark construction.
Noah applied his marketing skills to convince the people to come aboard. At first they accused him of just wanting their money. So to convince them he was only concerned about their safety he cut his prices down to zero. This freed up the person taking admissions to help with ark construction, which seemed always slightly behind schedule. The additional hands would help it get back on track.
People came to visit Noah’s zoo but mostly to make fun of the ark construction project. Not only did it not look like the advertised roller coaster, but the mayor threatened to sue because Noah had not gotten the appropriate construction permits from the city council.
Noah was pretty upset about the whole thing. Not only did he really want to save his neighbors, but also he knew that taking care of all those animals would be easier if there were more people on the ark. Despite knowing that he and his family would be safe from the flood he had a really hard time being happy with his situation.
Then he found something new he could be happy about. He realized the flood gave him an opportunity to get rid of the flea problem that had plagued his zoo. He decided to announce it at his weekly ark update meeting with the animals. If everyone was attentive the meeting would generally last about 15 minutes, but if they weren’t listening it would take longer. There was generally never a problem with the hippos or alligators as long as they were in separate ponds. The giraffes with their long necks usually stayed in the back and were pretty quiet as long as no one was touching them. Noah learned the hard way to have the meeting in the morning so that the owls would be too tired to ask him “Who?” while he was briefing.
Mr. Hyena had been laughing all week at a joke he heard and the night before the meeting finally settled down enough to tell his friend, Mr. Wolf. Mr. Wolf desperately wanted to share with his wife but he didn’t stop laughing about it until the morning. On the way to the meeting Mr. Wolf was telling the joke but before he could finish they arrived and Noah had started talking.
Now anyone who’s ever had a good story to tell knows that it’s hard to stop before you’re finished. It’s like getting to the last bite of dessert and someone telling you not to eat it. Still, Mr. Wolf did his best to listen and be polite, but as the meeting wore on the punch line kept getting more and more funny in his mind. It was like having an itch and not scratching. Everyone knows if you catch an itch early it goes away pretty quick, but if you let it linger it starts to spread all over.
Noah unveiled his plan to get construction ahead of schedule by not building the scratching posts in each of the stalls. Just at the moment when Noah was explaining why they wouldn’t need the posts Mr. Wolf couldn’t hold it in any longer and told his wife the punch line. The joke was so funny they laughed all the way through Noah’s instructions to take a bath to kill the fleas before boarding the ark.
All of the animals except the wolves followed instructions and took a bath. When the flood came Noah cried knowing all of the people had known were drowned. Sure he was grateful to be alive, but it was hard to focus on that. He tried hard to find a happy thought, and the only one he could think of was that he’d finally be rid of fleas.
Life has a way of making everything seem to go wrong all at once. It was during the 40 days and 40 nights of rain when Noah discovered the wolves didn’t bathe. The fleas had already begun to spread again to the other animals. Every animal voiced their disapproval. The lions roared, the cows mooed, the cats hissed, the dogs barked, and the horses neighed. The entire time they didn’t have a scratching posts to ease their pain.
When the rain stopped everyone was invited upstairs to watch Noah send out the dove. After it flew away Noah reminded them about the customer surveys they would be filling out at the end of the cruise—just in case he ever had to do this again. The animals didn’t wait to fill out a survey before they started offering suggestions to Noah about how to punish the Wolves. He tried to listen patiently but it was mostly just noise. After spending all of those days itching with no relief tempers were pretty high. The lions were seriously about to prove they were the king of the jungle and threatening to eat everyone when the dove came back with the olive branch.
In the excitement of the dove returning everyone forgot about their itching and Noah herded them downstairs promising to brief them of his solution at the next meeting. That’s why today the olive branch is a symbol of peace. It stopped the animals from fighting.
When the water receded the animals again gathered so Noah could collect their customer surveys. He figured that because he hadn’t gotten rid of the fleas they’d all be back in the ark after a few days trying this whole thing again. It was at this point the rainbow appeared and God told Noah the earth would never have a flood like that again. Because of all the complaining Noah had gotten distracted thinking the purpose of the flood was to get rid of fleas, not wickedness. People still get distracted today having trouble remembering the difference between God’s goals and their own.
There was still the matter of the customer surveys. Noah really didn’t want to read everyone’s ideas about what to do. Can you imagine having to read one survey for each type of animal?
Noah quickly came up with a plan to punish the wolves. From that day forward the stories Noah told his kids where the wolves would be the bad guys. Those stories are the same ones we tell our kids today. Who do you think wrote Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs? And it all happened because some wolves didn’t take a bath.
And so the moral of the story is: Take a bath when you’re told or people will be talking about you.
