when bad photos go badder

Here's what you need to know this morning.

1. I took this photo a few years ago on while hiking with a good friend, my college's chaplain, on our huge sprawling wooded campus. On that hike we saw a pretty little green snake, a picture of which I have probably already posted before but, if not, I'll post soon so you'll see how cute he was.

2. The campus is so large that I have biked on a number of trails for years but am still discovering new nooks and crannies of the campus. While we were walking, we turned down a gravel road I'd never checked out before. Turns out that it led to this church. It was early summer and humid and warme in the late afternoon. The weather was oppressive, and the elements combined to gave me a distinctly "Deliverance" type of forboding. The church was in good repair, but it just screamed "compound" or "cult," and I expected to be snatched up from church folk coming out behind the wood piles (there were wood piles) either for a good old fashioned human sacrifice or just to abuse me.

Or both.

3. The church had a huge bee's nest under its awning (is that what that is? the part of the roof that sticks out from the house?), and you could hear the bees from a good distance away. I wanted to get close enough to take a good photo, but the bees were very active and became agitated as I approached their hive. My usual fearlessness with a camera abandoned me. I'll take confrontations with weirdos any day over an attack of swarming bees.

4. It turns out that the bees were African killer bees, and I was lucky I got away with my life!! So it turns out my judgment was prescient.

5. Number 4 is a lie.

6. The bees did add to the general creepiness of the scene, and I wondered how the parishioners could focus on the service when the bees were buzzing so loudly. Also, surely a few of the bees made it into the building.

7. The last time I was stung by a wasp was at a church we were visiting while church shopping. We church shop because we're American, and that's what you do. When you're American. You church shop. I can't recall whether we were arriving at the church or leaving, but I remember walking down a hallway and putting my hand into my pocket. If we were leaving it was to get my keys, and if we were arriving it was to send a subtle nonverbal signal to those around me that I don't want to shake their hands.

7.5. Why can't we just bow to one another instead of shaking hands?

7.75 Sometimes a handshake is a nice warm affirming moment of human contact. And sometimes it's a neutral act yet still very germy. And a few people are so bad at shaking hands that it conjures up terrible images of how their soul is corrupt and filled with bugs.

I'm just saying...bugs. Or worms. Their soul. Because their handshake is disgusting. And you know just who I'm talking about. About one in fifty people have such an awful handshake.

7.9 But as I was saying, as I reached into my pocket I pricked my finger with a needle. Or so it felt. Now why in the world I put a needle in my pocket escaped me. Then I pulled out my hand and with it I pulled out a wasp.

7.95 Why did my wife put a wasp in my pocket that morning?

8.0 At that same service, I was fixated by a wasp buzzing around my pew that kept hitting a window. Over and over again. My temptation was to do the congregants a favor and to quietly take a step to my right and squish it.

8.1 But I suspected it's wrong to use a Bible for the purpose of squishing bugs. Even stinging bugs. So I didn't kill it, or if I did my unconscious mind has suppressed the memory.

9.0 Being superstitious and seeking out signs and portents, you may be tempted to think that if you go to a church and are assaulted by a wasp and then tormented later by another one, then Satan is in that church and you should stay away. But I don't think along those lines, so it never crossed my mind.

9.4 That's not true. I did think those things and had to fight every fiber in my body from standing up, screaming "Satan is in this house!!!", and fleeing while shrieking like a a little girly man.

9.6 Because Satan was definitely in the house!

10. When I think of infestation more generally, I'm drawn to a story of Paul, a good friend of mine. Nearly as much as anything else in my life, this story sent me down a path of spiritual crisis and violent theological questioning.

It goes like this, in truncated form. Paul heard a funny kind of scratching noise under or around his bathtub. He looked everywhere and could not figure out what it was. Was it a twig rubbing against a pipe, and the noise was transmitted through the bathtub? Was the piping under strain? What? What? The sound carried on for a few days--I forget how many--and then stopped.

End of story. Or so he thought until a few months later, Paul had reason to go into the crawl space under the house.

And there he found a skeleton of a possum hanging upside down by a foot that somehow got trapped underneath the bathtub. The scratching sound had been the possum clawing for his life. Day after day.

When Paul told me this, I stopped in my tracks. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually.

It struck me instantly and overwhelming about the unimaginable amount of suffering going on at this very instant--I mean right now as you are reading this--that is unknown to anyone else. Suffering in the animal kingdom. Suffering among humans. Unbearable horrific suffering. Children who are kidnapped and hurt in horrific ways. People who are lost and terrified. People starving. Pelvic bones crushed from car accidents. Diseased bodies filling their owners' lungs with fluid. And on and on.

You have heard of mystical experiences in which a great light opens up and the mystic receives a kind of ineffable epiphany of goodness and transcendence.

I encountered the same kind of experience in reverse. What I experienced was not a chain of thinking. It was a near-physical blow of awful understanding that made my knees turn to rubber. I saw with perfect clarity the utter and complete indifference to life that characterizes the cosmos.

But who am I to think a loving god should have--tiny tap--released that poor animal's foot? I mean, where was I when god laid down the foundations of the earth? I neither know nor understand, so surely it's not my place to question any of it. That would be wicked.

11. As I may have shared with you on an earlier post, a few years ago I read a news account of an Amish family whose three daughters died when, while playing a game, they squeezed themselves into a cedar chest. When they pulled the lid down, the latch fell and caught, and the girls suffocated.

I have three daughters.

I'm confident our all-loving and omnipotent God was doing far more important things than to condescend to reach down and--tweak--unlatch the children. Oh no, all things work for good under god's providential care, and their death by suffocation surely works to the betterment of we survivors and all to god's glory. I feel better knowing that, don't you? That you can't see the obvious good that god brought about through their terror and suffocation only reveals your sinfulness.

Becuse let's not forget that our default position for our original sin should be immediate death and a one-way express ticket to hell. Anything better than that is nuthin but a mercy thang. The girls were blessed beyond all measure to make it to six years of age, the little sinners.

I'm sure these daughters' parents, who were good pious folks, instantly saw the glory of god's plan and rejoiced at their deaths. As we all should, knowing god's plan is sovereign and loving and glorious. God knows the number of hairs on our head, and he knows when a sparrow drops from the sky. He knew about this deed and gave it a great big heavenly thumb's up!

I for one know that my own faith was deepened and strengthened by reading this news account.

12. I manipulated the photo above to capture the sense of creepiness I felt at the church.

I failed.

As you can see below, nothing about the pre-manipulated photo conveys anything but sunny and bright and cheerful feelings.

13. Which is the kind of day I wish for you all today. Have a good one!!

14. Number 13 is not ironic. To acknowledge the awful is not to deny the goodness of lovely sunshine and warm days. And I do wish you a lovely day.

15. Really really.