Chaos and Control

Strange story, but one with a point. When I was a little girl, I wanted to help my sweet mother cook. One day she said I could help with a lemon meringue pie, which she made from scratch. I would have to use the old mixer, which I guess hadn’t been used in a while. I detached the mixer head from its base. What happened next is a little bizarre.

An army of cockroaches emerged from the base. I have never seen so many cockroaches at one time since, and I live in the South. They just kept coming. We sprayed, we smashed—well, I did. This put a major glitch in making the pie.  Finally the last one came out.

All right, I know that’s gross, so I’ll stop. They were hiding and festering and breeding in that mixer base for, who knows how long? We had no idea. I shudder to think about it, and it’s been probably 55 years.

I’ve thought about that story a lot lately because of the chaos we seem to be living in right now. I feel as if there is a thin veneer of civilization and laws over all of it, and it wouldn’t take much for the veneer to be ripped off and expose what’s underneath. Not unlike when I’m gardening and move a stone to see the lizards and worms and grubs beneath the stone, scurrying away.

We work really hard on that veneer. We close the doors to the bedrooms when people come over. We close our computer screens so people can’t see what we’re looking at. We put cheerful photos on Facebook. We send Christmas letters that tell of graduations but not school suspensions. We want our exteriors to look controlled. And we want control of ourselves and our environments and the people in our lives.

No more than I can keep those critters out from under the paving stones and bricks in my flower beds, I can’t control my family or my friends or really much of anything. I have very, very limited control. Tomorrow my cells may go rogue and decide to reproduce in the wrong place and at the wrong pace. My immune system may not be strong enough to ward off exposure to COVID or anything else. Those nutty drivers on I-75 who zip past me past me without being sure they have cleared the front of my car sufficiently might come over to my lane too quickly.

But. . . beneath the grubs and earthworms that our veneer covers, there is something else. Someone else. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.