Not too small.
Suddenly, so fast I would have missed it if I hadn't been concentrating, the chameleon's long tongue shot out and the end stuck to the fly. The tongue was even longer than the chameleon. Chameleons almost never miss. His long tongue quickly disappeared, curling up somewhere inside as he pulled the fly into his grinning mouth. Once again his eyes began searching around and around in different directions. He chewed very slowly.
I grabbed for him. He couldn't move very quickly, though he tried to get away. He might have dropped off the branch down into the bush and then it would have been nearly impossible to find him again. I caught him around his fat middle. He tried to bite, but the rough edge of his mouth wasn't very sharp, and his mouth was smaller than my fingertip. Some chameleons hiss too. Even though my little friend was scared of them, I wasn't. Chameleons have bad spirits in them he told me, but I didn't believe it. The chameleon knew he was caught, or maybe he wasn't so scared, because after a little while he stopped squirming.
When I freed him, he started walking across my hand. He might have wanted to walk off, but I kept on putting the other hand in front so he never got to the edge. He slowed down. He stopped. He sat there on my thumb, looking round and round with his bulging, wandering eyes. He slowly turned a dull black and his markings got blurred. He curled his tail and became very still. He liked my warm little thumb, I think. I finally had a pet.
I kept him in my window on the curtain, but he didn't turn red. He got sort of brown. I caught flies for him in some of the other windows, but he didn't seem hungry any more. I got tired of watching him. After dinner, I proudly showed him to my mom, but she said, "I don't want him in the house. He might go walking on the floor and someone might step on him and squash him."
"If he is a mother he could have tiny little chameleons," I told her, "lots of them. They would be just this big! Wouldn't that be neat?"
"You better let him go," she said. I don't think she thought it would be easy not to step on all those little chameleons. I took him outside and put him on a rosebush in my mother's rose garden, but he got lost.
I thought I was big enough to go to boarding school, but I still had to get big. I guess you need to be pretty big to do lots of things, but I remembered the story my Mom read that night from the Bible. She said, "Little children are never too small to come to Jesus."
The people in the story were telling the children not to bother Jesus. I think my mom thought I was a bother sometimes because she would tell me to go outside to play and let her do her work.
Mom read in the story where Jesus said, "Let the little children to come to Me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child, he shall not enter into it."
Mom said, "That means to let the little children come because He loves them." I liked that. She said, "Jesus likes people to be like little children when they come to Him because they believe everything He says, and they know He can take care of anything."
I was glad I wasn't too small to come to Jesus. I could find another chameleon tomorrow. Jesus would help me find one.