Fire Ants

I have this sudden fascination with fire ants; perhaps because they are attacking small children at my place of work. Sweet, unsuspecting children – minding their own business, just swinging on a swing, sliding down the slide and suddenly… ANT ATTACK! Horror movie quality… ok, really not at all. But they DO bite… and it CAN hurt… especially on little people bodies. Obviously we want to squash this horror movie asap; hence, I shall now lesson you in the art of fire ant homicide.

There are many ways to kill a fire ant. Some say pouring club soda on their mound will suffice, others mention garlic, gasoline, urine [picture that], a mixture of peanut butter and boric acid, or death by drowning in boiling water. Another method, though much disputed, suggests sprinkling rice over the mound. This theory proposes that, after being ingested by the fire ants, the rice will expand inside of their bellies, causing them to explode. Boom! Similar to the rice/bird scenario mentioned often at weddings. And let us not discard the old-fashioned, colonial-times way of simply step on them with your boot. All of these methods, though I realize how incredibly scientific they seem to be [wink wink], not only waste groceries but are also the most unsuccessful at long-term prevention. Why, might you ask? Because, in all of these ‘solutions’, you risk the very likely chance of missing the queen. Yes, the queen. The queen is as essential to the livelihood and preservation of ‘fire ant’ world as she is in the game of Chess. You can survive with only your pawn and your rook… but not for long. If you have tried all of your options and yet one single queen survives, she will find a man, er, drone ant and produce several thousand offspring in less than thirty days. Busy bees, er, ants.

Now, I COULD take this time for some gender analysis – brag about how queen ants get to live six or seven years while male/drone ants live approximately four days. I could then mention that female spiders, after having their babies, get to kill and eat their male counterparts; moreover, it is the male in “seahorse world” that gets to have the babies and take care of them while the female seahorse gets to go out with her friends and party all night long. Alas, though that is fun to discuss, I would rather like to write a comparative study on fire ant prevention versus sin prevention in the life of a Jesus-follower. Are ya with me?

If you’re not a perfect person, then sin is a part of your life. If you don’t like the word “sin” [because perhaps you grew up in a very fundamentalist, legalistic household or simply despise all terms “Christian”] then we can easily replace the word “sin” with “mistakes, foibles, screw-ups, faults, shortcomings, and bad habits”. All of those will do just fine. Oftentimes, although this shouldn’t be the case, we i.e. the world like to categorize our sins [mistakes, foibles, screw-ups] into minor and major. Minor examples would be gossip, white lies, and the occasional bout with road rage. Major examples would be serial killing, rape, corporate embezzlement of millions, etc. And the space between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ is a wide and long spectrum of greed, materialism, hypocrisy, alcoholism, cutting and self-mutilation, adultery, abuse… and the list goes on and on. Longer than Santa’s.

And there are people, followers of Jesus and not, who are trying their hardest to eliminate that… junk… from their lives; but here’s the deal… it’s not working. I mean maybe its working for awhile… you might squash this fire ant here or that temptation over there… small victories. But in the end, it always comes back. You’ve seen it a hundred times – on Entertainment Tonight. People losing their lives, mixed up in drugs or sex or hoarding addictions… my gosh, it’s all true. They wake up, they realize it, they try to untwist the mess that they’ve twisted, and it works… for a month, a year, several years… but soon enough, off the wagon once again. It happens to us, too. You and me, the celebrities of our own lives, twisting our actions into things they shouldn’t be. We wake up, we realize it, we try to untwist the mess that we’ve twisted, and it works… for a month, for a year… have you been there? Years ago, I assumed I was healed of a "minor" flaw... and then the frost disappeared and the trees blossomed, and there it was. Infiltrating my life, biting and stinging, all over again.

I didn’t get rid of the queen. The root. The core. The nucleus. The heart of the matter. I stomped on the ants I could see and thought that would cure the chaos. Jesus puts it like this, “And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. For it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.” Huh… are you picturing this and laughing awkwardly? Gouge?! Bleh, really?! I mean sick, gross, and wrong. What janitor wants to see that in the trashcan? Now, I don’t think Jesus meant this literally. I think Jesus had the fantastic gift of exaggeration in order to wake people up to the truth in their lives. I think Jesus knew [because his Father told him] that no fallible human being can rid themselves of any particular sin until they reach deep within and figure out the issue engraved harshly within their souls. Maybe the core is physical pain, childhood abuse, fear of abandonment, unhealthy body image, the simple dislike of yourself as person… What’s the real deal here… for you? Because I promise you, seriously, you have my word. You will never rid yourself of that burden until you honestly deal with the baggage inside.

How many of us, in so many ways, have been trying to step on thousands upon thousands of fire ants, when the truth is we simply needed to go after the queen?

I urge you to put aside the club soda and the peanut butter. Forget the rice. Find a friend, a counselor, a minister, an Oprah… someone that you truly trust beyond words, and share your heart. God wants His people to be free. God wants us to live in a world where we don’t get stung and bitten by the fire ants in all of our front yards. God wants us, God wants YOU, to enter this life and the one to come with joy and peace. 

May you not be afraid to open the closets [yes, plural] and let the skeletons out – because dealing with THAT truth is what will truly set you free.