A Lesson From Ladybugs

 The Fall my husband and I moved into our first house there seemed to be an abundance of ladybugs.   As the weather cooled, they settled on the house in nooks and crannies around windows and cedar shingles to hibernate.  The house was covered; I couldn’t get over how many ladybugs there were.

               It was a difficult time.   We had, only a few months before, lost our first baby who had been stillborn.  I was raw with grief, we both were.  Money was tight.  Daily life felt like quite a struggle.  In an effort to stretch funds we kept the heat pretty low, and used a wood stove to try to keep the house warm.

One day around mid-January the house seemed extra cold, so I decided to try to start a fire.  It was an old woodstove and could sometimes be a little tricky to light.  I couldn’t get the fire to light; all it would do is smoke.  In frustration I slammed the stove door.   A panel came out of the door, and now with a hole in it, the door could not contain the smoke.  As basement began to fill with smoke, I quickly ran up the stairs to open windows.   Ladybugs, long forgotten, fell into the house off the window.  What a nuisance, in the middle of this mess I had to clean up a bunch of dead bugs.

I went to get a broom and dustpan.  To my surprise, when I got back, the ladybugs had begun to crawl around.  They hadn’t been dead; they were just too cold to move.   The warmth from the house woke them up from their hibernation, and now they had ‘come to life’.

The truth of it slapped me in the face.  Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  (John 10:10 NIV)  Before experiencing Jesus’ transforming love we aren’t really living, we are like those frozen little ladybugs, alive, but not really living. When we accept Jesus, His love transforms our lives and then we start to experience the life that He really intends for us, life to the full.   In the middle of my grief I had become cold and miserable, forgetting the full life God had intended for me.  God used some little ladybugs to remind me that He loved me too much for me to stay like that.  Thank you, Jesus, that in you I can truly live.