Don't Be a Cicada Christian!

Remember that old movie Poltergeist? Man, that was scary to watch as a nine-year-old boy who still wore Spiderman pajamas to bed. If you've ever seen that old horror movie you will remember the character's house was built over a sacred graveyard. This caused a huge territorial dispute. In the end, I'm glad the humans won.

As I quickly discovered last week, my house seems to fall into the same predicament, except I'm not battling ghosts and unsettled spirits but millions of tiny, ugly, and annoying creatures called cicadas. My house seems to have been built on an ancient cicada-harvesting plot, while my neighbors' houses go cicadaless. 

I'm now having dreams at night of my neighbors sitting in their porch swings sipping lemonade as I'm shoveling cicadas off my sidewalk. In these dreams my wife is Googling a recipe for home made cicada pesticide while my children are in the backyard making cicada shell necklaces! Our house is infested with this every-thirteenth-year curse. 

Yesterday, as I was taking out the trash, the nasty crunching noise I made as I walked through our cicada crop made me think about us Christians. It was an odd thing to realize the resemblance between these creatures and some Christians. May I share with you four similarities? I always like to ask (unlike the cicadas).

1.    Cicadas make a lot of noise but I never see them do anything. Don't be a Christian that's all talk and no action. All these cicadas seem to do is sit. Don’t be a Christian that comes to church just to sit. Be an active Christian.

2.    Cicadas come out of the World's dirt, enjoy the sunshine, and go right back into the dirt for 13 more years. Don't come out of a life of sin and then dig yourself back into your old lifestyle. Remember, you are a NEW creation. The old lifestyle of enjoying sin has passed. 

3.    Cicadas shed their skin.  Don't put on the moral coat of a Christian on Sunday only to shed it off Monday through Saturday.  

4.    Cicadas take over your place without asking. How rude! Some of the bossiest people I know are professing Christians. Don't have the "I'm right, your wrong, so I can do whatever I like" mentality that many Christians carry around today.

Let us all put to good use these lessons taught from our infesting friends. Well, I must get back to work. Now, where did I put that shovel?