I like shrimp.
Not only are they delicious (especially in the all-you-can-eat variety), but they're actually amazing little creatures.
If you ever find yourself the owner of a pet shrimp, you'll learn that it has an amazing amount of personality for an invertebrate. No two shrimp are exactly alike.
The first peppermint shrimp I ever owned was an extrovert. The little guy always wanted to say hello and was always front and center at meal time, even pushing my clown fish out of the way.
Unfortunately, his friendly charm and curiosity met an even more curious puffer fish, and, well…
The current peppermint shrimp I own is totally different. He's a recluse who only shows his face at night. Even then, he's near impossible to spot, only emerging from his hidey-hole when he absolutely has to.
But in early February, I noticed the little guy was missing.
I considered him a casualty in the War On Bubble Algae that I'd been waging in my tank.
It all started when I added what the bubbles hate the most: Flow.
I needed to make it impossible for those rolly-pollies to survive by replicating the tidal forces of the Great Barrier Reef. But they kept clogging the grates of my powerheads and the intake to the canister filter that pumps dirty water out of my tank, into a sump, and back into the tank again.
I made a few small cuts in the intake grate, taking care not to make the holes big enough for any living things to be sucked in (besides the brittle stars that sometimes wander too close).
The astute reader probably sees where I'm going with this.
With more flow and extra powerheads, I had won the war.
But my shrimp was mysteriously gone.
Six weeks later, I found myself cleaning my aquarium before an Easter get-together. The canister sump needed to be cleaned and a bit of baby bubble algae needed to meet its Maker.
I dumped the filthy canister tank into my utility tub.
Plop!
There was the exoskeleton of my poor shrimp!!!
The dude had been sucked into a tiny space, in the total dark, surrounded by gunk in a swirling current.
I continued my cleaning with the limp shrimp in my peripheral. It was odd that his exoskeleton was so red after all this time, I thought. Surely, bacteria would have turned him into goo.
Then, as I sprayed a bag of activated charcoal with reverse-osmosis water to include with the filter floss …
He jumped.
I couldn't believe it. The lil' guy was ALIVE? After getting sucked through three feet of tubing and living in the human equivalent of a 5x5 cell in total darkness??
You can imagine my shock. This shrimp that was dead had returned to me!
Then, being the weirdo that I am, I wondered how shocked you'd be to see a dead person turn up alive again.
There's no way to express that feeling other than to live it. If I was ecstatic that my shrimp was alive, how much more if a dead friend just walked in the door?
When we receive someone back from the dead, even the possibility of death, there is a wave of joy and relief and elation and hope that will overtake us all at once. Our own souls seem to spring to life again.
It could be a parent finding their lost child in a store, or a husband learning his wife's cancer is in remission, or the family realizing everyone is okay after a car accident, or a son seeing his father after a deployment in a distant war.
That feeling that death has been cheated is invigorating - our bodies naturally celebrate with a rush of adrenaline and other chemicals because we understand what it means to receive life back from the dead.
But winning out against the potential of death is different than beating death altogether. No one expects you to come back three days after you were beaten to a bloody pulp and pinned to a tree by the government. Three days of grave rot isn't something one comes back from.
Except, one man did.
That's the claim billions of people have believed the last 2,000 years, in part because that man's friends also died horrific deaths while telling people they'd actually seen their teacher rise again, body and all, and had touched him and eaten food with him.
Those strange people noted how this man fulfilled dozens of prophecies written thousands of years before he was born, but more than that, were determined to suffer at great length, for absolutely zero material gain, to testify that their friend had actually died and come back again.
Maybe they were lying. Maybe they were lunatics. Or maybe this friend of theirs actually did the impossible. And if he did, he's the only shot any of us have of surviving death.
If you think that shrimp of mine is happy to be "alive" again, how much more joy will you have to see death defeated?
O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?
