Bugs That Go Bump in the Night

I don’t particularly like bugs!  They are only good for frog fodder, and I’m not that keen on frogs either.  (Kermit is the only frog I’ve ever had any respect for!)

One night in bed, I got bit on the neck by one of these bugs.  It was a hard enough bite to wake me, and I was sick for two weeks.  When I called the Park Ranger at the Punch Bowl Park, he seemed to think it was an assassin bug.  I took it to a local exterminator.  He didn’t recognize it and sent it down to LA to be identified by their elite group of entomologists who discovered that it was not an assassin bug after all but a ground beetle akin to the earwig.  These beetles don’t come into the house, don’t climb stairs, and they don’t bite humans.  They feed outside under rocks and plants on dead and decaying matter.  Since I’ve never known an entomologist I couldn’t trust, I assume one of two things.  I’m both dead and decaying, or I’m not human!

Well, I believe I’m human, and even though I am not dead yet, I really am decaying.  Actually, we are all decaying.  As much as we try to suck it in, fill it up, paint it, or give it a tuck here and there, we are degenerating at a rapid pace—some more than others.  Then why do we get so depressed at that first wrinkle, or that second love handle, or that forehead that’s expanding at an alarming rate?  Why do we expect things to get better instead of worse?  Joan Rivers is the only one getting better and better, but let’s face it, the rest of us are on a downhill run.

Why is it so hard to face our weakness—our finiteness?  Bertrand Russell, the famous atheist, has said, “Everyone would like to be God if it were possible; some . . . find it difficult to admit the impossibility.  To admit we are finite—the created and not the creator—is to uncover all the insecurities that brood within, all the fears of pain and crisis and lack of control that loom on the horizon of every active imagination.  In Hope Has Its Reasons, Rebecca Manley Pippert says, “This double-edged gift of imagination can inflate our pride and disguise our insecurity.”  It’s easier to utter lofty platitudes in church to a distant God, and then the rest of the week conduct our lives as if we are the gods, fully in control. 

Paul, the Apostle, had more to boast of than most, but in Philippians 3:8-10, he says, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.  I want to know Christ . . .”

So let us not lose heart, for “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day . . . we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (II Corinthians 4: 16-18, NIV)