Bug Traps! Are You Kidding?
Last year I was sitting outside the Sears store waiting for the store to open with nothing else to do but make conversation with whoever I could find. Just then a couple in their sixties came riding up on a Harley-Davidson bike. That looked interesting, so I thought I would talk to them a while. You can have a very interesting conversation with a couple of sixty year old bikers.
After that conversation wore down, another couple drove up in a pickup truck. That’s more my style, I thought. In a few minutes the man got out and sat on the tailgate of the pickup. Soon his wife got out and decided to walk around the parking lot to get her daily exercise. Now understand, we were there way early with nothing else to do.
It wasn’t long before the gentleman and I were engaged in conversation. I asked him what he did for a living. He told me that he was a “bug catcher.” A bug catcher! I couldn’t believe it. He went on to tell me how he worked with the farmers in the state, helping to define and exterminate bugs and other crawly critters. He explained how he sets bug traps in the fields and how to go about calculating the infestation per acre in the general area. Once he finds and identifies the bugs, he recommends a cure to the farmer. An entomologist! Amazing!
As I was coming in to work one morning some months later, I actually saw one of these guys at work. There he was. The headlights of his pickup were still on. He had been there since early-thirty… catching bugs. I slowed down to see what he was doing. There in his hand was a bug trap and he was sorting and counting the catch of the day. He wanted to find out what was eating up the crop. What a job!
As I rolled on down the road it hit me. How come we are not as smart as some agricultural agent? Why is it that we can’t be as prepared to find out what’s eating us up.
We often go through life with things eating away at us. These things slowly move from thoughts, to emotions, to personality, gnawing at our very heart and soul. Obliviously, we sit by and let it happen without even a fight.
What if we were at least as aware as the farmers? Perhaps we should set traps to find out what’s eating away at our souls. Perhaps it is a creeping critter like “faithlessness.” How many of those would we find in our traps? Maybe it could be something as slimly and slithering as “apathy.” Who knows, it could be a critter with a razor sharp stinger like “gossip.” What if we set the traps and found the slow crawling, pot-bellied, lazy-legged creature of “procrastination?”
Whatever is out there, we must realize that Satan is going to use whatever he can to destroy us. He takes no prisoners. He wants us to suffer. He wants us eaten alive. We must be ever watchful.
Just like the little guy I saw, we need to get up early, turn those lights on, set those traps and find out what’s eating us. If we don’t, there will be no crop in our field and when we stand before God fruitless, He WILL ask “Why?”.