Earth Day

I am not a fan of bugs.  If it's a ladybug or a cricket -- something that seems good and sympathetic and harmless - I might try to get it outside safely.  But most insects do not meet with that kind of good will.  And unfortunately, with the good weather has come an infestation of all kinds of creatures at our house.  Most prevalent are ants, who seem to prove Darwin's concept of survival of the fittest.  The more I kill, the tinier and faster the next generation seems to be.  And there are the stink bugs, who are incredibly slow and stupid, but if I don't catch them just right in my wad of toilet paper make the worst smell.  When my husband sees me hunting these bugs he starts to sing, "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all." 

Last week it got even more exciting.  My daughter Sophia had a friend over to play and the two of them were playing dress up in the basement.  Suddenly they started screaming and stormed upstairs telling me they'd found a huge spider.  I went down to investigate with a tissue to catch the spider but when I got there found a spider the side of my head.  Well, maybe not quite that big, but big enough that until I saw the thing move I thought it was a toy spider and the kids were playing a prank on me.  I couldn't bring myself to kill something that large (and potentially poisonous, I feared), so I trapped it under a bucket for my husband to deal with when he got home.  (His worries about God's creatures evaporated quickly when confronted by the King Kong of spiders.)

A few minutes later they came up talking about the lizard they'd found.  I thought that surely this time it really was a prank.  No such luck:

Of course, a lizard is not a bug.  It is bigger, it is cuter, I think.  It does good things, like hopefully eating all the spiders in the basement.  But it's funny how I would never even dream of harming the lizard.  In fact, I went out of my way to insure that my three year old son would not poke at the poor thing with a golf club.  (Boys!)  Since today is Earth Day, I find myself wondering what it is that makes us have sympathy for some of God's creatures and not for others?