Hungry for Blood

I hate mosquitoes.

Don't you? Look at that picture! It's enough to make your skin crawl.

This is a strange thought to have dancing in your brain first thing in the morning. Especially when I opened my eyes to a whitened world of snow-covered pine trees here in New England. Why am I even thinking about mozees?

Maybe it was a whining sound from somebody’s brakes outside, or a hissing from the furnace, but I woke up remembering how much they aggravated and annoyed us on a daily basis when we lived in the jungle for sixteen years. 

They are thirsty blood-hunters and blood-thirsty hunters. A nuisance when I was trying to sleep, hovering behind my elbows when I was trying to work, and landing on my ankles when I was trying to teach. Try as you might, you could never cover your entire body in that heat. Thank God, there were refreshing heaven-sent reprieves from their misery!

It wasn't just the annoyance of their stinging bites. In the tropical jungle, they infect you with malarial parasites and all who lived there struggled with repeated cycles of fevers, chills, vomiting and mind-splitting headaches that would last for three days. New chloraquine-resistant strains were breeding around us too, like the deadly cerebral version.

So, what is it about them? Mozees, so hungry for blood, relentlessly seeking a warm body on which to prey. Those pesky varmints march out in force no matter what the obstacles. In the jungle we would burn stinky coils, use lotions and sprays, and swat at them with little straw brooms, but nothing could deter the vicious band. Yes, mosquitoes teach a solid lesson in perseverance that could bolster any army.

Do I seek God with diligence, or do I easily get distracted and let little things derail or disrupt my pursuit of the Almighty?

One day it hit me, even mosquitoes were created with purpose. They could either drive us out of our minds, or drive us to God.  

Truth is, we need blood to survive physically, and a blood covering to ensure we live eternally. We need the shed blood of a sin-bearer in order to be forgiven.  

God said, the life is in the blood and without it there can be no forgiveness of sin. The whole message of the Bible makes this key point.

Without the blood of our sin-bearer, we will not survive the judgment seat of God on our own merits. We need the covering of a pure and worthy sacrifice. We need Christ, whose blood was shed on the cross of Calvary in our place in order to receive forgiveness before a holy and righteous God.

Thank God for His heaven-sent relief!

If you haven't found relief perhaps a better question would be, are you diligently seeking? Maybe mosquitoes are God's little reminders to the planet that we need blood to live, and we need to seek until we find it or we will not survive.