Ladybugs

And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. Revelation 9:5

            For the past several days we have been afflicted with our recurring plague of ladybugs. When I was a child having a ladybug land on your hand while working in the garden or yard was a real treat. We would let them walk on us and admire their red shells in which wings were hid, and appreciate their assistance to us in controlling harmful garden pests. No more! The ladybug that now lands on us is larger and has an orange shell, and it bites!

            We no longer see the little red ladybugs we admired, appreciated, and played with as children. One gardener told me the orange ladybugs ate them just like any other insect. But we have literally swarms of the biting kind that manage to invade the house, get into the bed linens, and rudely interrupt rest. Not only that, during the day the fly into hair and anoint it with their noxious scent; and should you crush one be prepared to be punished with their form of chemical warfare. When they swarm in numbers they give off a scent that makes you look through your home for a chemical spill.

            A friend in agriculture told me the government had bred these pesky ladybugs, and dumped them over us in an attempt to control insects that multiplied during a past unusually warm decade. What they did was exchange one problem for another for people living in the region. But it is one more example of men experimenting with forces they do not understand. All the lessons of the past do not keep them from wanting to press forward with genetic engineering experiments however.

            I am not the first to suggest that the torments unleashed upon men during the time of Tribulation might be connected to their own sinful tampering with God’s established order. It would be consistent with God’s past actions such as the plagues He visited upon the Egyptians. After all, those plagues had to do with Egypt’s Gods, so why should not God afflict men in the coming time consistent with man’s worship of weird science? It is something to think about when I can get away from ladybugs!