May 19, 2008

Some Grasshopper Thoughts
by Pastor George Van Alstine

“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.” (Isaiah 40:22)

You probably don’t give much thought to insects, unless they impact your life. You may swat at a mosquito, but otherwise, the history and culture of mosquito society is of no concern to you. Generations of mosquitos may live and die within a few feet of your house without any awareness on your part. Other insects may have an effect on your world if their numbers are large, such as a bee colony in the eaves, or a cockroach convention behind your refrigerator. For a short time, you may battle them frantically, but you don’t spend much time thinking about what life is like for an individual bee or cockroach.

And yet, every individual insect is a wonderful creation. It eats and breathes and reproduces. It has a heart and a brain, and, on some primitive level, it “thinks” and “feels.” It has a powerful drive to survive in spite of the forces that can destroy it. I sometimes try to imagine what a tiny insect is experiencing. I think of each one as a “point of consciousness” in the overall world of living things.

Isaiah said that, from God’s perspective, we are “like grasshoppers.” Though an army of grasshoppers can destroy an entire field of crops, it’s hard to see an individual grasshopper as mattering very much. That’s how God views us in the overall measure of things.

Of, course, there is the surprising, miraculous revelation in the Bible that God bridges the great significance-gap between himself and each grasshopper-human. He actually sees in this creature an image of himself, which causes him to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of these little “points of consciousness.”

A couple of weeks ago, I lay on an operating table, surrounded by a number of other grasshoppers who were referred to as surgeons and anesthesiologists and nurses. They did a little grasshopper-dance around me and made some physical adjustments to my abdomen. As I woke up, my grasshopper-family stood around me and reassured me. For all the medical people, family and friends who went through this experience with me, my recovery was a symbol of their own individual grasshopper struggles against the natural forces that will, sooner or later, bring each of them down.

So, I’ve come through, and we’re all happy and relieved. But the greatest comfort to me is that my Father God, to whom I am nothing more than a grasshopper, does not treat me that way. Instead, he is acquainted with my infirmities and bears my sickness (Isaiah 53:3-4).

I am very, very glad that God does not treat me the way I treat grasshoppers.