We love spring because it means new life….everywhere! The snow melts, rivers fill up, flowers bloom, newborns of every kind appear round about us…including ants! Warmer weather means beach days, planting gardens, picnics and B-B Q’s. The Princess Parable Series has a seasonal book called “A Royal Easter Story” and it takes our five princesses into the woods for a Princess Tea Picnic with all the beauty of spring and an opportunity to rescue a lost little girl…
“A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on its mind, indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs with a lot of initiative. Four ants together or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the hill, but as though by blind chance.
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits!” An ant could never be thought of as idle…they never stop moving …aggressively!
While living in the Darien, my husband had no fear of snakes, scorpions, spiders …BUT … the ant…he had great respect and trepidation. Our youngest daughter, only two, took some cookies to bed with her one night. We heard her moaning in her sleep. A swarm of army ants had gotten under the mosquito netting and a foot wide swarm of huge black ants had come up from under the wooden floor and they were after the cookie crumbs and attacking Kim! Ralph, in one fell swoop, grabbed our daughter and tossed her into my arms. The next few moments were ear-shattering, as he crunched and sprayed the mass of teeming ants, re-directing their onslaught!
When the dust settled, we realized there was a life-lesson to be learned and it was more than just NOT taking food to bed! The thinking phase of initiative is to plan, calculate, invent and imagine. The opposite of initiative is to be idle! We are to study the ant because God calls us to the take initiative and be actively moving toward His mind and heart daily. Amy Carmichael wrote, “Satan is much more earnest than we are…he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost us.”
Let’s be busy this week carrying out the will of God
by enthusiastically and assertively keeping in tune with
God’s heart and His leading.
“Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” Proverbs 6: 6-8
~Jackie Johnson - I am a former tribal missionary to the Kuna Indians on the Colombian border in Central America. Fluent in several languages, my husband and I currently pastor a Spanish-speaking church in Southern California. My passion is mentoring and equipping dedicated young women for life, marriage, motherhood, and beyond. I am the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of three Princesses and four young Knights.
