People Plague
Theme of the Week: Hurried Sick
Monday, August 25, 2003
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Key Bible Verse: The crowds began to gather again, and soon he and his disciples couldn't even find time to eat (Mark 3:20). Bonus Reading:Mark 3:21, 31-35
For centuries nobody knew where locusts came from. As Annie Dillard recounts in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, though locust plagues can blacken a sky for nine hours as they pass—no one understood how or where they originated. The millions of ravenous creatures could denude entire countries. Entomologists would see them laying eggs and label specimens, but find none the next year. Years later, they'd mysteriously reappear.
The mystery was solved in 1921 by Uvarov, a Russian naturalist. He determined that locusts are ordinary grasshoppers "gone berserk." Placed in crowded glass jars, grasshoppers became locusts, a process Dillard describes:
"They literally and physically change from Jekyll to Hyde before our eyes. They will even change, all alone in their jars, if you stimulate them by a rapid succession of artificial touches. Their wings elongate; their color heightens; stripes and dots appear. They are restless, excitable."
Has there ever been a better description of people, stimulated by the artificial touches of caffeine, Fox TV, fluorescent lights, adrenaline addiction, computers, and telephones? We metamorphose into people plague.
—Chris Blake in Searching for a God to Love
My Response: I feel overstimulated when …
Thought to Apply: There is more to life than increasing its speed.
—Mohandas Gandhi (Indian nationalist)
Adapted from Searching for a God to Love (Word, 2000) by permission.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
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Eternal Father, I know it's not Your plan for me to feel driven. Please reveal to me Your perspective on my time.
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