plague of gnats

A visitor would think my whole neighborhood suddenly came down with Huntington’s Chorea. Everyone is slapping themselves: slapping their heads, slapping their arms, slapping their fronts, slapping their backs, as they walk determinedly to the community mailboxes.

It is the season of the white gnats. They come every fall and they stay till first frost. Hordes of them. It is 62°, so they may be here a while. Coming in with our mail, I looked like a windshield.

I demand to see their leader. I want to ask him something: “Does this look like Egypt to you?” Seriously, a reasonable person would expect to see pyramids and camels, trying to swat his way through the gnatstorm.

Through my window, the gnats resemble snow flurries. Or a micro-meteor shower. Picking them off my black sweatshirt, I notice they actually are pretty things; their wings are transparent. God gives all of His creatures some kind of gratuitous beauty. And in the course of His sovereign governance of all His creatures and all their actions, He caused, for His own good pleasure and purpose, from the unknowable counsel of His will, several hundred of His wonderfully made white gnats to perish by crashing into me.

How amazing it is to be made so useful and involved just walking down to the mailbox! Still, the frost couldn’t come too soon.