Hidden Blessings

I have been dealing with these pesky little creatures for awhile now. In fact, no matter how much poison bait I left out for them to eat and take back to their fellow ant friends, I still found them crawling here and there around my house. I sprayed the entire perimeter of my house with Home Defense twice and used an entire bottle of Terro liquid gel, but to no avail. My little unwanted house guests didn't get the idea that they were supposed to find a new location to forage for food as soon possible!

After a month of failed attempts and a visit from a family member where I had to politely ask him to pardon the poison on the bits of tin foil in the basement near his room I decided it was time for some outside help. Maybe it was the fact my boys watched the Ant Bully on Sunday night and it got my mind buzzing. Yup, it was my turn to become the bully and phone up our friend Matt who just happens to be the best exterminator around.

Tuesday morning bright and early Zach from Innovative Pest Management knocked on my door ready to tackle my problem. I told him the situation and he soon was on his way wiping an even deadlier gel in the corner of my windows and began exploring my yard for the main cause of my problems- the colony. He was thorough and lifted the stones, poked the ground and peeked under all the bushes. He was going to solve this mystery.

A half an hour later he rang the bell and gave me the news. There was good and bad. My heart sunk. I just prayed he wasn't going to say he found a nasty infestation of termites that would later hinder my ability to sell my home. Gladly that wasn't the case. Good news: he found the ants. There was a huge colony under a rock in my front yard and a smaller one on the side of the house. He sprayed them and while he couldn't guarantee they wouldn't return, I wouldn't be crawling in my basement anytime soon. Sounded great to me!
Then came the bad news: While lifting up stones in the back yard he found this: A black widow spider. My heart soared, this wasn't a big deal. I grew up in Utah where on occasion I would spy a black widow in her web just outside my basement window. I could deal with spiders. He asked me if it was okay to spray her. Of course, but I wanted to get a peek at her while he did it. The girls and I carefully walked down the deck stairs behind Zach to where he had found the hazardous eight legged creature. He took us to the decorative stones close to the guest bedroom window, put on some gloves and then removed each rock until he found her. He wanted to save her for a bug collection and then spray the area. I was amazed when he lifted the piece there she waiting, defending her territory. You see she wasn't just waiting for dinner to find their way into her web, she had been nesting. Yes, there were egg sacks near her and she wasn't going to run and hide. She was protective of her soon to be babies. As he trapped the spider and sprayed, a second female Black Widow spider came into view. Upon removing more stone, even more egg sacks were found.

As I watched him kill the spiders and destroy the eggs, my mind began to put the pieces together. The pest man didn't just find a spider, he had found something on a much bigger level. This would have turned into a very dangerous situation if it had gone unnoticed. This section of rock is just feet away from the guest bedroom window and our back door. Josh is often right next to it as he shoots hoops in the basketball standard. The girls have been known to sit on the rock while their brothers played ball or soccer and often picnic just yards away from the nesting site. This could have been a scary and serious problem if it had been left untreated.

What a blessing it was to have found these poisonous spiders before the babies invaded my home as the temperatures cooled. I could envision the tiny babies entering my home through minuscule cracks and setting up house in the storage room, in the Legos or behind the TV. This would have been a nightmare.

The whole thing rattled me just a bit and made me shiver in disgust. My children could have been in danger and that frightened me the most. One bite from a female black widow will put a small child in the hospital. And yet my kids were safe because of some annoying yet harmless ants. Who knew that ants could actually be a blessing in disguise. That these small bugs would leads us to a much larger and serious predicament.

How often in life are we protected from danger by an irritating and unexpected complication. Do we even grasp that these small obstacles can lead us down a safer path? That these seemingly insignificant matters can actually add up to so much more. That what was once thought as a trivial piece in the puzzle of life is really part of the main big picture, not just some bit on the edge no one would have noticed. I think I often am in too much of a rush to comprehend that trials can really be for our good. That we are helped through the bad and that we can learn and grow because of them. The negative can allow us to mature as a person in wisdom and knowledge and increase our spiritual understanding. It's hard to see in the moment, but once in awhile you grasp that bigger perspective and you see how something so unimportant really did make an enormous difference in the end. Thanks ants for leading us to the spiders, but also for teaching me to appreciate and understand how I am helped along each day through the small ups and downs we call life.