Farms have bugs, insects of all kinds. My grandparents’ farm was no exception. My memory is not of cows swatting away incessant flies with their tails, mercilessly tormented by the constant buzzing, especially around their eyes beyond the reach of said tails. But I know what the cows must have felt like based on my own personal experience. Those flies were deadly, but we kids were better equipped to do battle—we had two hands that could reach most landing places on our bodies, without the limitation inherent to a cow’s tail.

Why write about flies from my childhood? As I mentioned at the beginning of this series of articles, life is made up of mostly mundane things and events, but God is in it all if we look for Him. Histories mostly ignore the ordinary stuff; the volumes written about the past include mainly the big things, like wars, outsized military leaders, life-changing discoveries, and famous people (because historians chose to write about them; therefore they became famous). Abraham of biblical fame was noted for a few times when God actually communicated directly with him—monumental events, to be sure. However, over a 175-year life span, apart from the handful of supernatural events, his life as a nomadic herder was pretty much mundane, looking after his flocks and his growing family and entourage. Without TV, magazines, sea cruises, Super Bowls, tennis, surfing, or video games, there was not much to do that was exciting by today’s standards. Life was mostly mundane. My own life, too, has not been much different from any other in the mundane—but God desires for all of us to see His fingerprint in our lives.

This brings me back to the bugs at the farm in northern Minnesota. In these little, living creatures, I see God’s glory. The variety of bugs is quite astonishing, and the number of them is uncountable. I understand there are about 3,600 species of small flies in the world! Kill one, and a legion of others are coming in on the attack; it never ends.

First, there were the gnats (as we called them). These were so small you needed special screens to barricade against them with an extra-fine mesh, but they would get under your clothes and in your hair—a terrible bother. A super-8 movie film captured me and my cousin Dave, both around four or five years old, in automatic combat mode, trying to eat our bowls full of popcorn sitting cross-legged in the tall grass. On our faces we wore paper masks, made by one of our mothers, with two holes cut for our eyes and tied onto the front of our faces by a string around the back of our heads. Dave looked like a normal kid, but I was sporting a unique cowlicked, short-butched, white-blond hair. We were utterly fixated on snacking with our heads down, examining each kernel before eating them in order of largest to smallest. We refused to be distracted from our essential task by the confounded flies, so while one hand was working the popcorn from bowl to mouth, the other hand was wildly swatting flies from our heads, backs, and legs, at times digging them out of our ears and hair, and away from our eyes. The popcorn was delicious nonetheless.

The horseflies were among the two worst insects (some people called them dear flies). These were big, and when they bit, they left a divot when they extracted flesh! Mosquitoes, the other of the two worst, came out in late spring and early summer, laying their eggs on watery surfaces. These blood suckers drilled through our skin to extract blood for the protein and iron used to produce eggs. That was so treacherous! They used our very life source to produce an ever-growing legion of attackers against our very persons! To make matters worse, they left an itchy welt so we wouldn’t forget who won each battle. At times, when we won the occasional fight, we ended up with a blood splat from the smashed critter. Between horseflies and mosquitos, killing them was like killing our own flesh and blood!

Thank the Lord, though, for dragonflies and fireflies. I thought they looked like miniature B-52 bombers compared to the kamikaze gnats, mosquitos, and heavy-duty horseflies. The dragonflies lived off eating other flies, like gnats and mosquitoes; Gramps told us never to kill them; they were our allies in the war. They would simply fly around, feasting while in flight, clearing the skies of the nefarious vermin. The temptation to launch our surface-to-air artillery (i.e., rubber bands) at the B-52s, albeit friendly fire, was too great to resist. But alas, and fortunately, we never scored a kill.

The other entertaining insects were the fireflies, which glowed periodically at twilight. We would catch these fascinating creatures and fill a glass jar with them, poke some holes in the tin jar lids so they could breathe, and then hide under our bedcovers at night while we read comic books to their light. What a blast! It was short-lived; the bugs got bored and would quickly settle down and stop glowing. But for boys like us, it was part of discovering and experimenting with our natural surroundings—we were budding young scientists!

When we consider the abundance and variety of these insects and combine them with all other species of insects, animals, birds, and microscopic organisms like bacteria and viruses, we become overwhelmed with the variety in creation, God’s creation, for He made everything. The complexity, beauty, intricacy, abundance, and variety are nothing short of fascinating. The notion that it all spontaneously came into being by impersonal chance is beyond belief and emanates from the desperate desire to disbelieve in an intelligent creator being, namely, God. Such thinking rightly dwells in the realm of the absurd. In reality, less faith is needed to see and acknowledge the signs of intelligence in all of creation. Indeed, as the prophet Isaiah recorded, “The whole earth is full of His [God’s] glory.”