fireflies look like cockroaches, but no one hates fireflies… seriously…

Bioluminescence.  I told Mike that I’d be blogging about this and here it is…

My first encounter with fireflies occurred many years ago in North Carolina.  My dad was at NC State finishing his Master’s in Computer Science, I believe, and we lived in some apartment.  I’m told my mom and I used to walk to the McDonald’s across the street; I don’t remember much from that time in my life, but I know the apartment building was tan, there was a playground with a spring horse (those wobbly plastic animals with springs underneath) and once during the winter, I wore a black parka with red faux fur and dusted the snow off that horse.  There’s also a video lying somewhere around the house of my cutting a birthday cake.  I was a cute kid.  But the most vivid memory I have of that era is during the summer my dad and I would head out at dusk with a glass jar and wait for the fireflies to begin their mating ritual.  We’d watch the bugs glow and trace out peridot trails in the air and he’d catch them and we’d bring them back to our apartment.  This memory is so strong, that I used to think we didn’t have electricity or that light bulbs hadn’t been invented yet!

This weekend I was at La Jolla Beach.  We soon-to-be-college-graduates and the already-been-college-graduates were all gathered around the bonfire; we soon-to-bes were staring into the blackness of our futures and punctuated the silence with questions about post-college life when someone told us to look out at the beach.  While we stared into that black ocean, punctuated with foamy white crests, not knowing what to expect, suddenly it happened: a flash of carribbean green rolled in and disappeared with the break.  Someone attributed it to the moon, but the moon wasn’t out that night.  Someone else spoke up, “Bioluminescence!”  Bacterium were using ATP to emit light and do God knows what.  ”Bioluminescence” from the Greek bios and lumen meaning “living light.”  Maybe I’m just this hopeless romantic, but I see God’s word almost everywhere.  And on that night, with every crashing wave, he was whispering “living light” to us.  

To us, the future is uncertain and the waves will come crashing down but somewhere in there we’re called to light the way in and trust that God knows what He’s doing with us.