Squash Bugs!
Not long ago I was working in the garden. I had planted my summer squash and zucchini too close together and the crowding was resulting in not enough zucchini production. (When has that ever happened?) The thinning was long overdue and the plants were a tangle of living and dead leaves and stalks, spent blossoms and withered efforts at fruitfulness. There was plenty of litter from the early growth lying on the ground. Ah.. Nature doing her job of recycling and insulating the soil; effortless mulch, right?
Wrong!
I know better! Hiding place for squash bugs. ARGGGH! I killed at least four of them and then went on an egg-hunt. There they were — tiny, shiny brown ovals laid in neat rows on the underside of the broad, prickly umbrella. No more!
Now the hunt began in earnest. Every piece of leaf litter picked up. The underside of every squash leaf examined. I found one more cluster of eggs on the edge of a twelve-inch zucchini leaf. “Lord, help me find them all,” I prayed desperately! Then I looked at the cucumbers and melons…there were too many leaves to examine them all, but all of them were also susceptible to the devastation of a squash bug invasion! Ai!
Finding those bugs with their brown and gray shield shapes and hard proboscises nearly triggered panic. I remembered a year when the luxuriant foliage and cheerful yellow blossoms of a whole range of cucurbits filled my garden and my heart with joy and the hope of a plentiful harvest. There were the usual zucchini, yellow squash and picklers, and that year I had butternut squash, cantaloupe, honeydew and an abundance of the pale green, heat-loving Armenian cucumbers. One morning, I came out to find the zucchini plant dead, from the ground up, completely limp and lifeless. What could have happened? Some sort of freak plant death… ah, well, there are always the yellow squash. The next morning the yellow squash was the same!
A little research turned up a picture of the culprit. Now I knew what to look for, but, what to do? By now there were dozens of them swarming up and down the stems of the plants. Every morning I searched for eggs and smashed the adults between my fingers. Every morning I was greeted with more death and more tiny black-legged silvery-gray nymphs. Within a week I had lost almost everything in my garden to squash bugs.
In my sorrow, I was reminded of how God, more than once, used the loss of crops to get the attention of His people. I began to ask, “What is it, Lord? What is it in my life that you are highlighting by this pain?”
More research let me know that my careless attitude toward keeping the garden picked up had resulted in an abundance of habitat for the destructive creatures. They hide under the litter, even overwintering there.
“What is it in me that is hidden, opening the door to ruin?” The answer was rebellion. It was subtle: the quiet shrugging off of my husband’s leadership; clinging to some entitlements (like my supposed “right” to be loved in a particular manner). These are the kinds of ugliness that allow my “old man” to wreak havoc in my life. I can let them stay, or I can go after them: bugs, the eggs and the places they hide.
When God exposes the unpleasant, rebellious activities of the “old man,” it is our invitation to walk forward in new, Holy Spirit-empowered ways. The life that Jesus invites us to is a life of submission to the Father’s will. This kind of garden-tending is what is often called repentance. It means changing one’s mind, not a fickle, yesterday-red-was-my-favorite-today-I-love-green kind of change, but an uprooting of an old way of thinking followed by a replanting with a new way rooted in what God says.
So, here’s to more garden-tending. May every bit of leaf litter be removed and every hiding place for bugs be exposed to the Light of the world!
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