Don’t Go Splat
While driving hundreds of miles across West Texas and New Mexico, I watched the road. And I watched my windshield.
Did you ever notice which bugs splat against your windshield and which ones do not? Seriously, there’s a difference. Not all bugs that come into contact with your windshield splat. Some do not.
Some bugs come straight at you and make a bit splat all over the glass you just cleaned at the last gas station.
Other bugs come at you and rise with the air current speeding up your hood and windshield. But they don’t quite make it. They get partway up the airstream against the windshield and splat, but not as big a splat as the direct-hit bugs.
Then there are the bugs that come at you, and they flow with the airstream up your windshield, across the roof and past the car without ever touching it. They’re dazed from the ride, but they survive.
Mile-by-mile, I began to see why.
The direct-hit bugs are the heavier ones, the ones too cumbersome to even hope to catch the airstream and glide by. They can’t avoid the car, so they go straight into bug oblivion on your windshield. Less heavy ones almost make it. They’re light enough to rise a bit, but not enough to clear—and they splat. It’s the lightweight bugs, the ones with airy wings and bodies, that catch the airstream and flow with it above and past your car.
The three weights of bugs can tell us to
• Avoid materialism and burdening yourself with debt, or you may financially and psychologically splat.
• Avoid getting entrenched in life and business, or unavoidable change can make you go splat.
• Avoid holding on too much to anything in life, recognize eternity before you, receive the only One who can truly redeem you in this life and the next, and let yourself go into God’s hands. You will not go splat.
In the gospels this is clearly part of Jesus’ calling in how to live. And the Apostle Paul speaks of this in Philippians 3:7–14, particularly verse 8, “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ” (NIV).
Live like a lightweight bug.
