Dead Cicadas

Several hundred cicadas lie dead on the top of our parking garage at work.  Just a puff of air and they are blown from the roof, down the street, and into the giant hole torn open sevearl years back to create a high-rise hotel which since lost funding.  An awfully big grave for such a small creature.

At 8am I reviewed our finances and realized that we were going to miss our financial goal this month to pay off Kim's care completely.  Discouraged by this I thought through other possibilities that may allow us to succeed yet found none.  It wasn't possible.  Faced with anxiety about this, the scripture "rejoice in the Lord Always" came to mind.  Good timing.

My 10am meeting this morning cancelled, ironically ushering in an opportunity to receive the call of someone I've been following up with for a while.  Looks like he wants to do planning immediately and this will bring in enough income for Kim and I to hit the financial goal we had.  I could claim credit for following up with this person for 2 years in order for him to call me now to do business, but I am beginning to realize the limits of my control and power.  I did my role in the part, no doubt about that, but I'm like a musician who plays a few notes in a symphony performed by a much larger orchestra.  There is something else going on here.  Someone else making things happen.

I'm reading through a book right now...actually I am competing through a book right now as I try to finish reading a book before a friend who can read much quicker than I can.  Inside the book, Crazy Love, Francis Chan describes our existence as mere extras on a movie.  The movie isn't about us, it's about God.  It is His story .  In it, God creates universes, galaxies, worlds, people...He tells the history of mankind and of dinosaurs...discovery of invention, philosophy, and vaccines...of people going places and of coming back.  It has lasted millions of years so far and is a beautiful story. 

And what is our role?  We have a 2/3 second scene as an extra.  Because the 20 or 50 or 100 years we live on this planet is like a specin the wide universe of history and space. 

So, I can't help sympathsizing with the dead cicadas on the parking garage.  Their life exists of birth, burial in the ground for 13 years, then burstin from the earth to reproduce for about a month and die.  A tiny blip on the life radar.  Yet, with their strange lives do they not captivate our attention and turn our minds to questions of them and of He who created them?  Maybe our lives should look a lot like cicadas; a living reminder of the Great Story happening around us and the Great one who makes it happen.