The Bungee Cord 10-3-16

Hello, If you are coming to Western Pennsylvania, let me forewarn you that the stinkbugs have arrived.

Previous to moving here, I had never experienced stinkbugs and their fall-time population explosion. They are a bug about the size of a nickel with spindly legs and protruding antennae. As far as I can tell, they really don’t do any damage to things, other than leave occasional markings on walls. But when they arrive, they are everywhere! Everywhere outside, and somehow everywhere inside. Sitting on the couch, you will suddenly hear a slight fluttering, then feel something land on your shoulder or head, and soon you will feel it start to crawl on you.

But be careful! They don’t bite or sting, but if they get startled or frightened they put out a smell that is best described as “stinky”. The smell gets on your hands if you cup them in your hands, it wafts through the air of you smack them with your hands, and it permeates the room if by chance you smash them. They seem to have no purpose in the cycle of nature, and apparently their stink makes them the desire of no predator.

Some falls are worse than others as stink bugs go. A couple of falls ago they were so numerous that hundreds of them would crawl on window screens, almost as thick as scales on a fish. That particular year they discovered the air vent to our shower light so that when you took a shower and turned on the light it got dimmer and dimmer as the fall went on because of the growing number of stinkbugs piling up in the glass.

Who knows what this fall’s stinkbug encounter will be, maybe sparsely few or spectacularly overwhelming. Either way, they will be a pest.

In my life’s encounter, many of the “stinky” things in life are like stinkbugs. Certainly, there are those things that are more wasp-like in their attack on us, but a lot of the things that infiltrate our lives are less vicious yet more prevalent and more unrelenting. Smaller, day-to-day sort of things that have a way of crawling bothersomely, but harmlessly on you and me. And like stinkbugs, the dread they bring to life comes only if we react harshly and severely to them.

I give thanks to God for God’s grace to me, one who is often a creepy and crawly stinkbug lighting obnoxiously upon his efforts of love and mercy in this world. I give thanks to God for his grace that neither gently flicks me off of him or mightily crushes me, but instead finds me as one who is the focus of unfathomable love.

In western Pennsylvania, there’s no getting rid of stinkbugs, and in life there’s no getting rid of them, either. But I do know this, that as I live in the grace of God who has no desire to get rid of me, I am finding that I am being transformed by that grace to deal with life’s stinkbug encounters with similar grace and mercy….and in doing so, life isn’t quite so “stinky”.

Thank you, God, for your transformational grace.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger