“…the pestilence that stalks in darkness (part 3)”

Oh, you thought I meant last Friday? Sorry about that. To be honest, some of my reasons for procrastinating on finishing this fun little series are lame and one is, as you’ll eventually see, somewhat understandable.

So, before this story is a long as the adventure it’s about, let’s just fast forward to the moment, about a month or two after the bugs that shall not be named took up residence in my house, and had stubbornly refused to vacate, when I officially Hit. The. Wall.

I was sitting at my dining room table tearfully looking at websites like this one, pondering whether I just needed to do the all-American thing and spend a small bucketload of money and outsource the problem. It’s not like we have that kind of money just idly sitting in a corner begging to be spent on such things, but we could have managed. And I knew that I was coming very close to the very frayed end of my spiritual and physical rope.

But before I clicked “Book Appointment”, I spotted my Bible. For some reason, I recalled this post from my bloggy brother Frank, and so turned to Psalm 118. And read this:

“Out of my distress I called on the Lord;
the Lord answered me and set me free.
6 The Lord is on my side; I will not fear.
What can man do to me?
7 The Lord is on my side as my helper;
I shall look in triumph on those who hate me.

8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in man.
9 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in princes.”

It occurred to me that David was a man of considerable resources when he wrote those words. He had lots of men to hide behind and protect him. He had money and armies and lots of land in which to hide. And he knew that none of those things would ever be enough, even on their very best day, to defeat his enemies, unless God was with him. It’s better to hide behind the LORD than behind resources.

And as I sat there and continued crying, I began to meditate on just who this LORD is that the all powerful King David trusted in more than all his money and military. This was the LORD who at one point, actually sent an entire swarm of tiny bugs to plague a nation. (And I will note right here that if you study the entire story, God sent and then recalled all manner of plagues to the Egyptians, but He never recalled the bugs. There’s no mention of what happened to the bugs. Wanna take a wild guess where I think they ended up??? On the heads of millions of kids, that’s where. More on that later.)

God used a swarm of bugs to accomplish His purposes in Egypt; God was using a swarm of bugs to accomplish his purposes on Torrington Ct. (And just to clarify, they were never as severe as a swarm, but that’s relative when you’re talking about crawling insects in your daughters’ hair)

So, just what were His purposes? Well, not the same as His purposes for the Egyptians, that’s for certain! And I’ll confess, that at first, I couldn’t think of any that were really, you know, great. But if I truly believe that my God is the exact same God as David’s, and that He loved me the same way He loved David, I needed to stop trusting in all these man-made methods and money and everything else, and just sit back and trust God.

And God would take the bugs away, just as surely as He’d sent them.

Right?

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