After all these years and the many things that God has shown me to prove that He wants to be  involvd in even the least significant details of my life, my propensity is still to forget!  Here it is winter and yet I have been finding at least one mosquito a day inside my house. Yesterday I found three!  To date the headcount has been in excess of a dozen.  They can’t possibly be coming in because I don’t hold my door open....and even the houseflies have ceased to invade my territory.  There is no standing water anywhere in my home, even in the unlikely event that a couple of late bloomers decided on a misguided attempt at procreation.

Once again, rather than ask the Lord for His help, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time  fretting over this.  Any veterinarian would tell me that I should continue to treat my dog with heartworm preventive because of the presence of mosquitoes....more than I had even seen all summer out doors!  But it’s a poison and with her history of cancer, this option isn’t the best.

So after losing a bit of sleep along with asking everyone at the Thanksgiving table where they all thought these pests could be coming from and receiving no satisfactory explanations, I FINALLY remembered to ask God.  Last night as I was terminating the life of the umteenth million flying menace, I finally said helplessly and perhaps a bit absentmindedly “God please help me with this mosquito problem.”  Before I finished my statement, however, the words “maybe they aren’t mosquitos.” Popped into mind.  Now I have come to realize that when an answer enters my mind in it’s entirety, before I have finished asking the question, the information has not been the result of my own thought processes....especially since it turns out to be correct!

So I promptly consulted the Internet with this query “bugs that look like mosquitos.”  Expecting to find images of some obvious knockoffs, I was surprised to discover that winter crane flies so closely resemble mosquitos that one nearly needs to be an entomologist to differentiate between them.  Most significant, however is the fact that they breed in rotting vegetation.  Well that explains a lot!  I don’t have standing water in my house but I do have a worm farm for composting vegetable scraps.  Mystery solved!  Ever the scientist in need of proof, the next unlucky specimen ended up on a sheet of white paper beneath the watchful glare of my camera. Sure enough, he lacked the long proboscis which his mosquito counterpart uses to impale the skin of it's victim.

Why the entomology lesson?  To remind myself that I need to be ever conscious of the fact that God wants to be involved in every aspect of my life and is delighted when I remember to seek divine consultation.  Nothing is too great or seemingly insignificant to escape His notice or concern.  I could have saved myself hours of consternation had I simply said from the onset “Hey Lord, where did that mosquito come from?” To which He would have quickly responded “It's not a mosquito.  Look it up.”

I can almost hear Him chuckling as He saw the relief that the assimilation of this new tidbit of information brought to me.   It’s not umlike the time I was 6 or so and presented my mother with  a glass jar filled with wriggling baby fish.

“Look mum, baby fish!”
“Those are not fish.”  She corrected.

Though I don’t remember if she chuckled. Probably not.