Ants

When I was a boy we had lots of big (to a 7 year old) ant hills all over our property and I spent a lot of time watching the ants because they are really such interesting creatures. I also spent a lot of time making their lives miserable by digging up their hills to see the insides, building traps for them to see how they would figure out how to get out and filling their homes with water. What brings ants to mind at the moment though is the scripture I memorized when I was that age that is going through my head non stop today, to the point of being irritating! "Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise..." The ants, knowing that winter is coming take great pains to preapare for it, winter with it's cold and misery does not come on them unexpected and they are never unprepared, if they ever were they would end up dead so it's not an option for them whether to prepare or not. Now, where I live there are no ant colonies like there were on the coast but I prefer watching bees anyway, honeybees prepare in much the same way, they work their little lives away in order to prepare for the hard times of winter. Most of them have never seen winter because their life span is so short during summer there are several generations of bees through the summer, what is amazing is these bees literally work themselves to death so that several generations of bees down the line can live through the coming winter that none of them but the queen (and often not even her) has ever experienced! Now let's just compare that with people and the commonly seen bumpersticker usually found on huge motorhomes "We're spending our children's inheritence." or some other equally absurd way of saying the same thing.
People have far more reason to prepare than the ants or the bees, we have evedence of problems coming shortly or already happening and it doesn't take a genius to see that history repeats itself, when nations get as sinful as ours there is judgement, things are taken down and there are tough times! I can most compare people with sheep, they will happily be standing in line eating while the butcher goes from one to the other killing them. I am sure they might say just what people say today "How terrible, tornadoes blasting Kansas, hurricanes leveling the gulf coast, gas price so high people can't get any so are starting to steal it, Iowa flooded... but I don't live in Kansas or Iowa or the gulf coast, I live in LA and have plenty of money so the gas price won't really affect me, yeah they say we could have earthquakes but there's none happening NOW so I am perfectly safe!" What wise thinkers! I would prefer to "go to the ant" or bees, and prepare just a little. I can hardly believe the mentality of the people I see and hear about, it's a thoroughly disgusting form of insanity if I may be so blunt as to say so! What I hear from a majority of average people is (my terms, their thinking) "It's somebody elses responsibility to take care of me so if I just make it to work on time every morning and pay my taxes the government will pull through and care for me in whatever situation might show up. It's not my responsibility to take care of me, it's not my job to take care of my family, that is what we have retirement plans for, day care, social security, medicare, nationalized health care, Obama for president, McCain for president fighting the war kill all the terrorists in the world." (News flash! This has been tried and has never worked, you would have to institutionalize the entire globe and keep everyone on Haldol or its equivelent. I sure hope this plan hasn't been thought of by the power hungry groups or we may end up seeing just this plan implemented.) Don't you feel safe knowing the government will protect you from God? We can sin all we want now and God can't do anything about it because the government will just take care of everything...they mistakenly think. I wonder how the government will stop the fire and brimstone that may come down to devour such arrogance?
Since it doesn't look like the people are ready to turn around and repent I think it is a good idea to prepare for what we know is coming, prepare first by getting in a right relationship with our creator, then not giving up on the other people but try our best to help them get there too, then the other things like food and shelter etc. I won't go into that here because that is not the purpose of this blog and frankly, you can get that info all over the place if you look.