my pet gnat

I have a new pet.  I have named him Tang.  He is my gnat.  

I found him on my kitchen wall and instantly fell in love with him.  He was so beautifully created and had so much life in him left to live.  I adopted him as my own.  Yes, I know he's only an inconsequential speck that most people just squash.  But when I look at him, I see so much more.  I see evidence of his Creator and I want to treasure him.

So I will treat him like the royalty that he is.  He's a product of the King of Creation so he must be royalty too.

A friend walked in noticing me admiring my new pet and she laughed at me and asked what I was doing.  I told her I was thinking about what kind of home to build for Tang.  She laughed at me again and said I was being ridiculous, that Tang was nothing more than a dumb bug that would live for about 3 to 5 weeks and that there were so many better things to focus on.

I didn't care about how insignificant she thought Tang was.  I knew that he was a product of the Creator and therefore held infinite value.

So I decided to build Tang a home.  I thought about building a small ecosystem in a jar.

But he seemed more deserving than that.  So I decided on a larger home: an atrium off the side of my house, even larger than my home itself.  

And so I moved Tang into his new home and spent time with him on a daily basis.  I was consumed with care for him and watched his daily activities with great interest, understanding that every one of his actions, regardless of how tiny they were, were a direct result of the way the Creator designed him. 

My friends would stop by and watch me watching Tang.  They observed as I worked diligently to keep the temperature of the atrium at the perfect 77 degrees.  They couldn't see the beauty in the bug.  But I could.  I knew him well as I studied his movements.  I sat in awe at his amazing ability to hover over the pools of water in his home.  I praised the Creator as I observed Tang pollinate other flowers by carrying grains of pollen on his smooth, relatively hairless body.  Such a difficult task for such a little guy yet he continued to travel from plant to plant.  I watched in amazement at how he nibbled on the roots of plants that were 1000 times his size.  He was a wonder to behold and admire.

No one understood my fascination with him.  They continued to insist that he was just a useless pest.  And they secretly wanted to just accidentally squash him so that I would give up this nonsense.  But I knew better.  I had studied his value and I knew, without any doubt, that Tang had value that few would comprehend.  And so I dedicated all of my time to preserving his life and the lives of his children and their children.

When Tang passed away my heart was broken because of the loss but also infinitely pained because I could have saved him.  His delicate wing was injured (by a reckless fault all his own) and he had gotten caught in the web of a spider.  My large fingers couldn't pull him to safety because I would have crushed him in the process.  So I had to watch him fade from my life in a most horrendous way.  Such a tragedy.  If only I could have saved him.




So this is probably the weirdest post I've ever written.  But I had a thought about our level of insignificance tonight and wanted to reflect on it.  The truth is that there is an enemy who is looking at our world and trying to convince God (and even us) that we are ridiculously insignificant and not worth His time.  The enemy is waiting eagerly to retain authority over this world so that he can destroy what is most precious to God because he can't comprehend our value.  To him we are a bunch of failures that don't even deserve to live.  And yet the contrast of that is how much God values us.  He values us so much that it's ridiculous.  Outrageous, even.  The care and the time He puts into watching us, and tenderly providing for us, is probably the most preposterous thing imaginable.


I suppose the only thing more outrageous was if I found a way to turn myself into a gnat, climbed onto that spider web and wiggled my way in between his body and the sticky web, freeing him from it and taking his place.  Who would comprehend such a foolish sacrifice for such a useless gnat?