Yellow jackets and sin

Recently I’ve been thinking greatly about the fact that every sinful thought wants to run its full course in a person’s life. It doesn’t want to stay merely a sinful thought, but it wants to grow up as a child would grow to be an adolescent and then an adult. A lustful thought doesn’t want to stay a lustful thought. It wants to become adultery or worse. A covetous thought doesn’t want to remain so, but spring up into a life consumed by consumerism and paralyzing greed. Something happened recently that gave me a vivid picture of this:

Last week as I was raking leaves for my wife’s mom, I felt something sting my arm then my shoulder. I heard someone yell, “bees!” and I sprinted down the hill only to see that my shirt was covered with them as a swarm of yellow jackets chased me. I shed my yellow jacket filled shirt and outran the mob to the bottom of the hill. Pain. My arms began to swell. I plucked out the stingers and went inside for medicine. On my way in I noticed over 50 yellow jackets swarming over their disheveled nest.

After about an hour, I determined to finish the job and spite the bees that inflicted so much pain on me. Gasoline. Lot’s of gasoline. I figured I can finish the leaves and gain my vengeance by incinerating the pile. After 30 minutes of flames, most of the bees had either been toasted or had fled. I went it for clean up and discovered the largest nest I’d ever seen. It was larger than my 3-month-old baby girl. I raked it out to the middle of the driveway and peered inside the nest only to find larva. It was a bee-making factory. Yellow jackets of all sizes and forms were either stationary or emerging from the nest. Some were half-way out of the nest, squirming, attempting their escape. They never made their escape. I burned them too. As I thought back about that experience and about what I’ve been learning about sin, the two seemed to converge. Those bees sought my destruction. Some were full grown some still in the nest, but their end was to sting me, not always, but in this instance. The phrase, “be in the business of killing sin because it’s in the business of killing you” comes to mind in some way when reflecting on this. Really, that's why Jesus says, "if you hate your brother, you have committed murder" because hate is the child form, essentially the same person and DNA, of the adult.