A fellow by the name of Ed Peterman tells a story from his childhood, when he grew up on a farm in Preble County Ohio. His family discovered they had some rats in the barn, so his parents got some traps. One night they baited them with cheese, and set them out around the barn. The next morning young Ed went out to see if they had caught anything. The first traps he examined were empty. When he came to the last trap, he saw something strange. The trap had been sprung, and while there was no rat in it, he noticed that it did hold the severed leg of a rat. He ran to tell his parents about this unexpected finding. They followed him back to the barn.

When they got to the trap with the rat's leg in it, his parents just nodded and smiled knowingly. "What happened?" Ed asked them. "Tell me what happened!" So they told him. The trap had caught the rat by the leg. The rat knew that its life was at risk, so it chewed off its own leg to escape. "That's the way rats are," his father said. "Better to go on living with only three legs, than to die with all four." Ed just stood there for a while, marveling at the courage it took for the rat to choose to survive by chewing its leg off and leaving it behind. 

It makes one wonder whether we would have the courage to do what the rat did. If you were caught in a life-threatening situation one day, would you be able to cut part of yourself off and leave it behind in order to go on living? That's one of those things we never truly know, unless and until we actually faced that situation. Would I be able to surrender a hand or a leg, a memory or a grudge, an obsession or a long-held opinion, if my life were at stake? Or would I cling desperately to the futile memory of how things have always been before, and so bring about my own death?