Mosquitoes

As beautiful as our world is, it is fallen and sin-cursed. There is enough beauty here to stir our hearts with longing for God and enough of the curse to remind us that this world as it is is not our final destination.

I am headed for the Northwoods again. It is beautiful there. Tannin-stained waters clear to the bottom, the northern lights, bright stars over the lake, the call of the loon, bonfires at night, it is a beautiful place. I look forward to going there. The only thing that mars the paradise of the Northwoods is that there are enough mosquitoes there to sink the Titanic.

Yesterday at lunch Dwight Fredrickson told me that it was only twenty degrees in the Northwoods the night before. “Great,” I said, “Maybe that will kill off the mosquitoes.”

“It won’t kill them. It will just make them more irritable,” he said.

I said; “O, that’s funny.

“No, I’m not kidding,” he said. “They really do seem to be more aggressive after a freeze than before.”

Dwight reminded me that he grew up in Minnesota so he had the credentials to speak with authority about such things and he is a precise man not given to overstatement.

I just hope they will be calmed down by the time we get there. They are bad enough without getting them angry. With all the other things that complicate my life I don’t need to contend with angry mosquitoes.

The Northwoods is such a beautiful place, so peaceful, so beautiful, and so idyllic, it is good that there are mosquitoes, gnats and black flies. If they were not there we would get the false impression that we had already reached glory. God is faithful to allow enough beauty to tug our hearts heavenward and enough hardship to remind us that we are not there yet.

Ken Pierpont
Brook Place
Hinsdale, Illinois
May 21, 2007