Do Ants Believe in Me? (an odd thought I had the other day)
I have ants at my house. Problem ants. If I go into the kitchen when it has been empty for a while I usually will find 3 or 4, often scavenging the trash can or on the counter. When I get real close to them, they panic and try to flee, probably because they have heard the legends. Back at their colonies some of them have told the stories about the great being which kills them whenever it can and from which it is nearly impossible to escape.
You see, since they are carpenter ants I do my best to kill them. I have put out poison, I have attacked a major nest that I found (that probably set off some rather terrifying myths in their community) and any time I catch them in the open I squish them with my finger. But I am not sure they believe in me, at least, not at first.
The vision of an ant is very limited, one or two feet at best. So when the few ants who have encountered me and survived go back to their colony, they probably have differing stories about what happened. Also, the lifespan of an ant is rather short, going from egg to adult in just weeks, so I have been terrorizing the little bugs for generations.
Some ants probably hear these differing accounts and hear the old timers telling tales from their grandfathers and think that the old boys are off their rockers. Had too much honeydew from aphids or just imagined what happened. But they would have to come up with something to explain why so many of their comrades end up squished (I leave the bodies as warnings to the others).
But I don’t think they really truly believe in me. If they did, they would probably avoid the kitchen at all costs. They would realize that the reward for their behavior is a terrible death. But they don’t change, they keep coming and then I see them. When I see them, it is almost universally too late for them since I can spot them from across the room and by the time they see me, that gigantic finger of death is already coming at them. In that last instant before the squish I can imagine that they suddenly realize that all the legends were true. But by then of course, it’s too late.
I think that most people don’t believe that the wages of sin is death, that Hell is real and that the only way to escape from it is to accept Christ, repent and change from what we were doing. You see if people really did believe that, lives would be different. The problem is that at the end, when it is already too late, all of us will believe.