How to Kill a Scoprion Before it Kills You (and How to Forgive Yourself Afterwards)

It was ant-season - the season when no matter how much you scrub and clean the kitchen, an endless line of ants still finds something to chase after across the kitchen. When I would neither kill them myself nor let my mom to do it, she objected: "But you kill scorpions!"

"Well, I guess I'm a hypocrite," I replied to her. "I'm biased against scorpions."

And it's true. Maybe there is no logic behind my fear that if I don't kill them they will kill me, but I cannot fall asleep at night knowing that there is a scorpion wandering around the house, undead. And we tend to have such “visits” from time to time in the house we have been living in for the past 13 years. I am a much braver person now than I was when we first moved in and I owe it mainly to all the scorpions I have had to kill (rest in peace). It was a skill I had to develop and master, and you can too, if you follow these basic guidelines:

1. Never dig the ground in the summer. My first encounter with scorpions was when I was around six years old. Three friends of mine and I were digging the sand when suddenly a black insect with "arms" like those of a crab and a long hook-shaped tail crawled out of the hole we had dug. Two or three smaller ones crawled out too and followed the bigger one like ducks in a row. You can avoid going through this trauma simply by resisting the urge to dig the ground.

2. Scorpions hunt in packs. Either that, or they had picked a very unfortunate spot for a family picnic. After being greeted by five scorpions of various sizes along the route from the porch to the shoe rack, me and my visiting friend ran to the bathroom, yelling and clinging to each other, and locked the door. We waited as my mom and her friend Rosie, who had walked in right behind us, followed our trail and squashed the scorpions in the order we had discovered them. We only unlocked the door and stepped out when the last of them had been eradicated. Which leads me to my next point:

3. Locking the door can help. Of course, it won't actually stop the scorpion from continuing its regular route and walking in from under your door, but it might temporarily help you believe you are safe.

4. Cover every inch of your body, because the scorpion can and will detect any open area and send shooting venoms to that spot. Although there was nothing special about that one summer day, my mom and Rosie decided that the day had come for me to learn to kill scorpions on my own (but, really, it was the couch that was too comfortable). I was walking up the stairs to my room when I was greeted by a large scorpion. I squealed for help, but all I received were words of encouragement. They cheered me on and said they believed in me and that I would be "just fine.” I stood there frozen with my eyes wide open in horror. I was too scared to kill it. I was too scared to look away in case it disappeared. And I was too scared to flinch in case it got scared and sprang on me. After over 15 minutes of standing there with my breath almost held, I realized I couldn't keep doing that for the rest of the night. Despite the heat, I sprinted back downstairs to put on my boots, wore a hoodie, gloves, a hat, and covered my face with a scarf. I wore another pair of boots on my hands in order to stomp the scorpion with it. I couldn't take any chances. Who knows, the precautions I took that day might be the reason I’m still alive.

5. Your first murder comes with a cost. The guilt. I had never killed a scorpion before that day. It had been a completely different experience to watch others do it. But now I felt the blood of the tiny creature under my boots. The process of walking down the stairs and carrying up the broom with which I would gather it up felt like a silent funeral march. I didn’t know how my heart would ever sing again after what I had done.

6. Do not sweep up the scorpion right away. Because, apparently, they have one last scare prepared for you. It was my first experience gathering up the corps of a scorpion. I barely touched it with the broom when its body flinched. I screamed and ran for the closest hill. The good side of this is that the fright reminds you of why you had to kill the scorpion in the first place and somewhat deals with the issue of guilt. Until you watch it going down the drain and wonder if you flushed down the father of a newly formed family. About the flinching, someone later explained to me that for a few seconds after they die, their nerve endings are still active and might react if touched. Scorpions don’t resurrect after all. Nonetheless, I have come to the conclusion that it is wiser to wait a few minutes before disturbing the remains and also to…

7. Flush it down the toilet. Never throw it in the trash. It is what my mom always instructed me to do, although I don’t think she believes in the resurrection of scorpions any more than I do. But there is something much more permanent and comforting about flushing them down the toilet, as opposed to knowing they’re still in the house, dead or alive. And it would be much harder for them to find their way back to the house if they did resurrect. 

8. Relax during the winter, because apparently that's when scorpions hibernate. Except when they don't. 

9. You become a hero when another's life is at stake. It was still winter, so it felt funny to make a joke about scorpions to a group of family friends that would be spending the night at our house.

"If you see a scorpion, just call me," I said and laughed. We all found that funny until it actually happened.

I was washing the dishes when I heard screaming from the second floor. I rushed upstairs to find one of the girls jumping around, with a scorpion hanging onto her sandal. The other girls had gathered around, screaming, but too scared to do anything. It happened so fast that it was over before I realized it: I marched into the center of their circle, rescued the girl from the scorpion on her shoe, and squashed the poor creature with my own. I hadn't even had the chance to get scared, because I was so focused on saving our guests. They still remember me as a hero.

10. Not killing the scorpion to take revenge from someone else will harm you equally. As I was walking up the stairs to my room, once again I came across a scorpion on one of the steps. As expected, I squealed for help, but by now Rosie and my mom had gotten into the very convenient habit of telling me it was time for me to overcome my fear of scorpions and kill it myself. 

“If we keep coming to your rescue, you will never learn,” one of them yelled over the background of the TV. I couldn’t even remember the last time they had come “to my rescue.”

“What will you do one day when you are home alone?” As if they were doing this for humanitarian purposes. I had had enough. I decided not to kill the scorpion as revenge. I somehow circled the scorpion and fled to my room. I don't know about my mom and Rosie, but I sure as hell didn't sleep that night.

11. There is always someone bigger taking care of you. As much as your mom and Rosie care about you not dying, sometimes the comfort of the couch after a long day takes over. And so, you learn to be grateful for all the times you accidently get saved. However, too many coincidences make you wonder if they are coincidences at all. There are only two I remember, but there have been so many instances of "accidently" discovering a scorpion and killing it that I no longer think they were lucky coincidences.

My mom wakes up every night, sometimes a few times a night, and follows her usual route to the bathroom and back. "I never turn on the light," she was telling me once, "But this one time, I cannot explain why, I decided to turn on the bedroom light before walking out of it. Before I even realized what I was doing, the light was on and right next to my toe was a scorpion."

The other incident I remember happened to me when I opened the door to my room and, without even thinking about it, I turned around to look right at the corner where the door and the wall meet. And there, curled up in the corner, was a scorpion I would have never noticed unless I had specifically looked there. Usually, when I open the door, I look at my room and walk straight into it. But the fact that that one time my mom turned on the light and that that one time I looked straight at the corner, and all those other instances I don't remember remind me of how taken care of we are by someone that can see even in the dark.

12. Which can also help you feel less guilty about killing them. If you think about it, if the creator of scorpions aids you in killing scorpions then a) they really must be dangerous b) maybe it's not such a big crime after all c) he must have a better plan for their life. So, you can rest assured that killing a scorpion before it kills you might not be such a bad idea after all.


There you have it, my friend. Of course, my first and foremost wish to you is that you will never come across a scorpion. But, considering that you are reading this article, my guess is that you have, and that they scare you. In that case, I do hope that you found the steps I have provided useful. The two main things that have helped me are, first of all, trusting in the protection of the one that knows the location of every single scorpion that walks this earth, and, second of all, believing that scorpions go to Heaven after they die. The idea of spending eternity with little ghost scorpions (who will probably remember who killed them) might not be the most comforting one, but it might temporarily help with the guilt of killing them. After all, if you are anything like me, you might admit to having pondered whether killing the scorpion and suffering in guilt is worse than just letting it kill you. If so, I believe that my last two points will be most useful to you and might even save you from a needless self-sacrifice.

In Rest is Your Strength

It really was a good week for me. I was extremely tired from all the running around, but I was so productive, both at work and at school, plus I was in a "good place" with God. On top of all that, I was managing to meet up with my friends, spend time with my family, and even my time with them felt so satisfying and productive, whatever that means in the context of relationships. Even now when I remember that feeling, it brings me satisfaction, because I love it when the different parts of my schedule and my life fit together like pieces of a puzzle. But one evening, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed (okay, I didn't say that every second was productive) and happened upon a Bible verse my friend had shared: "In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat – for He grants sleep to those He loves" (Psalm 127:2).

You know how they say that when God convicts you, it brings you comfort and joy, and builds you up? That is how I felt. What He was telling me was that even if I hadn't been doing all those things, He would still be proud of me, He would still want to give me rest, and He would still take care of me, for no other reason than that He loved me and wanted to do those things. How contrary that is to our ideas about having to earn rest, having to work hard to make something of our lives, and to show God that at least we are making an effort so that He will agree to help us.

A lot of times I even applied that mindset to my relationship with God. I made so much effort to get close to God right now. I would ask God to speak to me through the Bible and then I would strain myself trying to find a connection between me and the passage I was reading. There have been many times when He has spoken to me through the Bible, but so often it felt like an effort to hear His voice. I thought that if I could pray enough, spend enough time with Him, read enough, and so on, I could push myself closer and closer to Him.

Then came a time in my life - I think a period of about two years - when I could do none of those things. I would sit down to pray, would stare at the walls, the ceiling, the clock, and eventually just give up and walk away. At the time, it felt like a waste of time and I felt so frustrated with myself for not being able to come closer to God. But in retrospect, that was the time in my life when I was finally starting to give up the fight, to learn to simply be with Him, and - ironically - getting closer to Him without either praying or reading or anything else I thought our relationship needed in order to grow. I am not saying that either of those things were bad; what I am saying is that my attitude changed and I realized that I could most experience God when I stopped being afraid of failing. When I stopped being afraid that His presence would slip through my fingers if I didn't do the right thing or use the right "method."

It also doesn't mean that God hadn't been by my side while I struggled to feel His presence - simply that all my efforts and struggling were not allowing me to feel it. When I finally found that place of rest, the place where I surrender even our relationship into His hands and trust Him to draw me closer to Himself, I was able to feel it, and in time the hunger to read the Bible, pray, and so on also came back to me. Just as David says in our beloved Psalm, He made me lie down in green pastures and led me beside quiet waters (Psalm 23:1-3). He literally had to make me, because I kept trying to sit back up and struggle to make Him come closer to me, not realizing that He was right there. And then He showed me these words in Isaiah 30:15: "For thus the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, has said, 'In repentance and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength.'" Wow! How different that is from the principles that run this world, isn't it?

So often, we take even His own words and "instructions" and give more weight to them than to Him. But we see a different picture in the story of Mary, who anointed Jesus' feet with "nearly a liter of extremely rare and costly perfume" (John 12:1-8), the price of which equaled almost a year's salary at the time. What she did didn’t save thousands, it was actually counter-productive since it wasted so much expensive oil that she could have given to the poor, and it certainly did not go well with the religious leaders. How did Jesus respond? He said, “Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached in all the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her” (Matthew 26:13). But why? What was it that made what she had done so special? It was because it flowed straight out of her love for Jesus.

He went on to say, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me” (John 12:8). So often we think that what God wants from us is to go, feed the poor, preach to the unsaved, love our neighbor, serve Him, etc. But Jesus really is saying, "All of that can wait; will you take a moment to just be with me?" Just look at the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42).

The response I often get from people when I say this is, "But if I think like this, I'll just sit back and do nothing!" Here's what I would say to that:

1. First of all, even if that were your reaction, even if sitting at Jesus' feet and just listening to Him caused you to do nothing, there is nothing wrong with that - you would still be as valuable and lovable in His eyes.

2. Even if that were the result, God's plans would not fall behind because of you. Look at what Jesus says in Luke 19:37-40: "As he was drawing near - already on the way down the Mount of Olives - the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, 'Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!' And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, 'Teacher, rebuke your disciples.' He answered, 'I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.'" Even if you didn't evangelize and tell people about Him and do all the things He wants to do in this world, the stones would, and according to Psalm 19, the skies are already proclaiming the works of His hands and making Him known, day by day and night by night.

3. Nonetheless, what I have found is that when Jesus touches your heart, it would take more strength from you to hold yourself back from talking about it and praising Him, then it would take to actually share about it. Imagine how hard it would be for the disciples if Jesus actually followed the Pharisees' request and asked his disciples to be silent after all they had seen Jesus do and had experienced with Him.

What matters is what flows from your heart. That is all that matters. Even if no one ever sees it, even if no one ever gets saved from it, even if it’s just you and Jesus. It might be different in the world's eyes, but remember that Jesus is your only audience and for Him, the only thing that matters is what you do out of love for Him, whether that means risking your life to tell people about Him or simply sitting at his feet, listening to and admiring Him.

The Sunlight

Our kitchen is wide and green and full of light. The air that fills it in the mornings is sun-color and sometimes I can almost enclose it in my palms, or at least run my hand around it and caress it. It feels so smooth that I can almost swallow it and feel it go down my throat and into my chest, warming and healing everything on the way.

Sometimes I sit there and stare out of the window absentmindedly, while the plants need watering and the dishes need washing. Sometimes I can almost hear them looking at me with a frown on their faces and whispering about me. But then they see my mom and a new hope glitters on their faces. They wait all day for the love. The peace lilies, rattlesnake plants, the plant that blooms an orange lily every year, the lavender, flowers I don’t even know the names of. The aloe vera plants, the leaves of which my mom used to squeeze and drip the juice in my nose as an anti-flu treatment when I was little. On the floor, the groups of little trees – pines, two avocado trees that she is so proud of. They told her avocado trees would never grow in Armenia. The climate was just wrong. But she planted them anyways, took care of them as they grew, and now even hopes for avocados one day. People tell her she’s being unrealistic, but then again, those are the same people that told her the trees would never grow. 

Once, when she was watering the trees and talking to them, I randomly asked her what she was planning to do with them once they grew into their full size. She chose to ignore the question, smiled to her plants, and began patting their leaves. 

“Our house is gonna look like a jungle, you know,” I said, “We can’t have people getting lost in our living room, trying to feel their way through.”

“That’s okay,” she replied, still patting her plants, like a mother to her baby. 

So that’s what the plants do all day; they just sit there, just being loved by the sunlight and growing. Why else would they grow if they didn’t feel the love on their skin? Even the thorny plant sitting separately from the rest. I hadn’t even noticed it there until one time, as I was dusting the windowsill, it pricked my finger. I jerked back and looked at it for the first time. It had thick branches that curved in every direction and had nothing but thick ugly thorns on every inch. 

“Why on earth would you buy this thing?” I asked my mom, annoyed. She stopped dusting the top of the fireplace and looked at me absentmindedly. 

“It’s called ‘the crown of thorns,’” she said. “That’s what they put on Jesus’ head when he was on the cross.” 

She went back to dusting the fireplace. I looked at the plant again and I could have almost cried. Months later, I began to notice tiny pinkish red flowers growing on its ends.


Our kitchen is not my favorite place in the world, but it’s where I always end up at. I sit there, at the table, doing homework or writing or watching YouTube videos that suddenly became so urgent, while my mom and Rosie hang out, cook. I would explain to you who Rosie is if I could. She is my mom’s best friend. She is practically my aunt, but not quite. She’s like my friend, but not quite. Rosie is just Rosie – her own category. We sit around the kitchen table in the evenings, while Rosie watches the news and my mom tries to concentrate on writing her blog-post.

“How can you listen to that all day?” my mom asks once in a while with a distasteful look. “It’s not even pleasant. Don’t we have enough problems in our own life, we need to go looking for the problems of the world?” Rosie usually just raises her eyebrows like a cat, without taking her eyes off of the screen, and continues watching. Once or twice she may have said that she needs to be informed about what’s going on in the world, but mostly she doesn’t bother trying to explain it to a woman who only watches period dramas with happy endings. 

“At least turn the volume down,” my mom relents. Rosie waits a few seconds before slowly moving her arm towards the phone and taking the volume down one click at a time. That way, it was by her own free will that she did that. 

My mom then turns to me and smiles, and then she turns to the table and the smile leaves her face. She sighs at the mess. But it’s not a mess; simply “categories,” I try to joke about it. Our table has categories. There’s the computers-books-pens-papers-cables section that somehow always ends up being there, despite my mom’s attempts to get me and Rosie to be more organized. Sometimes she runs out of patience, scoops everything up, piles them in the appropriate pair of arms, and sends them off to where they belong. Sometimes the pile is so unconquerable that, at the end of the day, she sighs to herself, says, “Our table has categories,” and walks away.

Sometimes we have the “hair salon” category. I can’t bring myself to do my hair in the bathroom or even in front of the hallway mirror, when I know that my mom and Rosie are in the kitchen, drinking coffee and tea respectively. I end up doing my hair while talking to them as they have their breakfast.

“Rosie,” I say. “You know, I had a prophesy last night.”

She looks up with an annoyed, but secretly amused look. This isn’t the first time she’s hearing one of my prophesies. “Yeah?” she says.

“Yup. Apparently you have to go somewhere at around 12:30. I don’t know exactly where, to tell you the truth, but you were going to pass by my university, so I thought you might as well drop me off. Feed two birds with one seed.”

My mom starts laughing.

“Mhm, sure,” Rosie says and sips her tea.

“Rosie,” I say. “You know what else? I know what you are thinking right now.”

“I’m sure you do,” she says.

“Yes. I know you really want to comb my hair, but you’re too shy to ask.”

“You wish,” she replies dryly.

My mom laughs even louder and pats Rosie’s shoulder. “Rosie is our joy,” she says. Then she turns to me and has a resigning smile on her face. “Give me the comb,” she says and takes it from my hand. 

We pull the chair close to the window and I sit sideways on it, feeling the sunlight on my back, and I close my eyes as the comb runs through my hair and the sun pats the places it might have hurt. Having my hair brushed is one of the pleasures in life I will never grow out of.

Afterwards, of course, the hairbrush and hairbands and every other hair-thing remains on the kitchen table, because I am late. I have to run out. I’ll put everything back in its place when I return – so I promise my mom. But, of course, that never happens.

The last category on our table is rather normal and expected – the food category. But it is full of things that should have been put back into the fridge, but never made it that far. The cheese starts turning yellow, the milk starts smelling bad, the bread starts drying up. I can almost hear them whispering through gritted teeth about me, that girl who takes them out but never puts them back in. But then they see my mom and sigh in relief. She saves them, just as she saves the plants (even the ones in my own room) when they need water.

Once, she left me alone with them for a week. I did water them, I promise, but they withered and dried up all the same. I didn’t even notice as day by day, the leaves of the avocado trees turned brown and began falling. I was told to water them and that’s what I did. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t been really looking at them until one day, as I was talking to my mom on the phone, she asked me how the plants were. I proudly reported that I had been watering them as often as she had instructed me to. I glanced at them and for the first time I noticed that the tallest avocado tree was almost naked. 

“Oh no,” I said. 

“What?” my mom asked, worried. 

“One of the avocado trees has lost all its leaves. But I swear, I’ve been watering them.” 

I didn’t know what I had been doing wrong. I guess they just missed her. They missed their sunlight. As did I.

On Self-Forgiveness

Usually when you ask for forgiveness, you're supposed to be happy when the person replies, "I forgive you." That's certainly not how I felt. All I heard was, "Yes, you actually were wrong!" when I would much rather have them say, "It's okay! You didn't do anything. There's no need to apologize."

You see, I couldn't bear the reality of having made a mistake, because I wasn't able to forgive myself. My only escape from the tormenting guilt were my attempts to minimize what I had done by finding reasons why maybe it wasn't that bad, maybe it would turn out to be a good thing after all, maybe it was just a misunderstanding that could somehow be excused, etc. Another calming method was weighing down the wrong I had done towards the other person with any wrongs they had done towards me. In some twisted way, having been mistreated or the prospect of being mistreated in the future became something I was glad for. It made us even and, therefore, helped me move on from what I had done. Until, of course, they went ahead and did something good for me or were kind towards me and just ruined everything all over again. When all else failed, there was always the beautiful comforting thought that I was merely a dot in this universe, not even, and that at the end of the day, nothing I said or did or thought really mattered.

But then this one time, I hurt someone really bad. I did something really unfair to him that I should not have done. I tried justifying it. I tried minimizing it. I tried remembering all the ways he had mistreated me and found none. I did the good old dot-therapy. Nothing worked. My big selfish act stared at me right in the face. It kept me awake at nights. It followed me around during the day. I even tried to punish myself in different ways to feel like I had paid the price and even that didn't help. There was only one way left to go about it. It was the big dreaded f-word. FORGIVENESS. I couldn't believe how desperate I had become that I was willing to resort to it.

I went up to him. I explained my reasons for what I had done. I told him how much I regretted it. I apologized. He listened and then looked at me and said, "I forgive you." I wanted to punch him. Wasn't he even going to TRY to contradict any of what I had said?

After that conversation, none of my guilt had left me. In fact, it had become worse because now my last shred of hope that the plaintiff would let me off the hook was destroyed. Butchered. So selfishly handled. I pictured how this one mistake was going to torture me for the next who-knows-how-many years, until I did something worse that would take over. I knew myself. I knew what was coming. All the years of pure torture that I had no escape from anymore. I felt so hopeless and horrible that I could've sat down right there on the street and cried.

But then I had this moment of epiphany. What if I actually did forgive myself and let it go? What if I made the choice to not think about it anymore? To not suffer when I couldn't change what had happened anyway?

It was there and then that for the first time in my life, I said to myself, "You know what? Yes, what I did was wrong. But I really don't want to spend the rest of my life suffering over it. The only way out of this is to just accept it and let it go." And I did! What I learned was that forgiving myself was a choice. It wasn't something that would naturally come to me; even if I sat down and waited, the guilt would never wear out on its own and disappear. I just literally had to decide to forgive myself and then refuse to think about it again when the thoughts came to me. To my relief, I found out that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life fighting those thoughts, because after I successfully ignored them for two or three times, they forgot about me for good.

I also learned that not being able to forgive myself is actually a form of pride. It literally means not being able to fit into my little brain how on earth I could have made a mistake. I mean, I am just so perfect. I don't get it. The reason knowing this helped me was because I used to think of forgiveness as something that was too good for me, something I didn't deserve. Like if I accepted it, it would mean that I considered myself more worthy than I actually was. Like I was placing myself higher than where I should have been; in other words, I was being proud. But it's actually quite the opposite; I would only be proud if I thought I was too good for forgiveness. Now, whenever the self-judgmental thoughts come to me, I just shrug and say, "Yeah, I made a mistake. I'm human. Big deal." I can almost see them growling at me in annoyance and walking away.

An idea that took me much longer to start believing in - even though I so desperately wanted to - was that my worth doesn't change because of my mistakes. I felt like if I hurt someone - sometimes even intentionally - it made me such a horrible person. Even small things like missing a deadline or judging someone in my mind or saying something stupid made me feel despicable. It got to a point where I couldn't even pinpoint what exactly made me feel that way; it was just me that was despicable. There is mostly no logic to guilt, but it can make you hate yourself in a way that you feel glad when people treat you like trash (I did my best to explain the "logic" behind it in the second paragraph). When you're in that place, even your desperate attempts at excuses can't make you feel any less despicable than you do. Thankfully, C.S. Lewis came to my rescue and wrote something about that in his book "The Weight of Glory":

"A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it" (p. 180-181).    

It seems to me now that forgiveness is a form of a much stronger love, one that can look straight at your mistakes and love you just the same. Whenever I start despising myself over something I did (or think I did), I have to remind myself that I am just as lovable in God's eyes as before. The reason I choose to see myself from God's perspective is because humans are imperfect and, unlike God, they are not always capable of full reconciliation as described by Lewis, which is okay. It is okay because it is quite normal for us humans to not be able to trust or love or even desire any contact with the person that hurt us even after the decision to forgive. And a lot of times, it is the right choice to move on from the person all together. The only thing that starts to matter after asking for forgiveness is if you will take yourself back and love yourself like before. And for me, what has helped me to do just that is knowing that God takes me back and loves me just the same, every single time.