“Leave the front door wide open, all the time,” God told Mel in a dream. Furthermore, God added, put three dishes filled with raw hamburger in every room in the house. Add more hamburger when the dishes became empty.
A very strange dream, Mel had thought, but who was he to question a command from God? He opened the front door wide and put the dishes in every room. The first day, hundreds of flies flew in. Each day, hundreds more followed. His wife Hazel was as religious as Mel, but her complaints increased each week. So one day, Mel drove to a nearby Wal-Mart. He bought three dozen fly swatters and returned home. He pounded small nails into each wall of each room, and hung a fly swatter on each nail. “There, that ought to do it,” he told his wife, handing her a swatter.
“What good is this? The front door is still wide open!” she yelled at him. He said that was okay; it was God’s will. They knew that He worked in mysterious ways. Maybe He was going to reward them when this was all over.
More and more flies moved into their south Florida house. When the kids opened their mouths to put food inside, flies flew into their mouths. After a while, the kids got used to eating the crunchy flies with their food.

The flies were less late at night, but they often woke Hazel up when they walked on her face while she was sleeping. “Do something about these flies!” she yelled at Mel one day. “When you go to sleep tonight, have a new dream! Dream that God told you to close the front door and throw out all this rotting meat!”
Mel drove back to Wal-Mart and bought two dozen cans of insect spray. When he came home, he sprayed the whole house. The house stank. Many flies died, covering the floor and carpet. The kids got sick from the fumes. But the next day, more flies moved in.“I can’t take this anymore!” Hazel yelled at Mel. “You have a choice—me, or the flies.”
“We’ll move into the back yard,” he said.
“That’s your solution? We have a perfectly good house, but we’re going to live outside in the back yard?”
“Not outside—inside,” he told his wife. “I’ll just build another house in the back yard.”
“Are we going to feed the flies in that house, too?”
“Of course not—unless God tells me to. And if He does, then I’ll build a third house in the back yard. We’ve got a big back yard, honey.”
“Yes, it’s big, but it’s not big enough for all the flies in the world.”