Go To The Ant Thou Sluggard

Proverbs 6:6

The Voice (VOICE)

⁶ Take a lesson from the ant, you who love leisure and ease.
    Observe how it works, and dare to be just as wise.

It had been a hot, sticky day in the desert in Southern California. Cleo, my dog, and I were walking up a dry dusty track at sunset. On the barren edge of the track was an ant nest. It was surrounded by a thick layer of the husks of seeds, showing that the ants had been very busy laying by stores for lean days. At this hour most ant holes show no activity except for a few guards standing duty in the hole.

What attracted my attention was a four inch wide line of ants stretching diagonally across the track. It was easy to see that this ant nest was on one end of this line. Curious, I walked along the line to see what was at the other end of the line. I wondered if there was a carcass or a rich supply of seeds that they might have discovered. It ended probably three yards (meters) off of the track at what looked like one entrance to a ground squirrel den.

The ants were scurrying into and out of the den. The obvious reason for all this activity was that there must be dead squirrel that they were cleaning out its remains. But I don’t believe that to be the case for several very good reasons. Firstly there was no odor of death, for even if I couldn’t smell it, Cleo would have, and she would have been vigorously digging down into it. The far more compelling reason was what the ants were doing.

In any line of ants there are always about as many ants going in one direction as there are going the other. This was true in this line, too. However, about one ant in ten was carrying an ant egg. Every single egg-bearing ant was going away from the ant nest toward the den. The den was situated in a site that had lots of potential food material, where-as the nest they were leaving was situated in a very barren, well-used track where people and dogs frequently walked.

Although it was quickly getting dark, the ants were all busy changing their home to a much better environment. And in their thousands, they were working with all their combined might and diligence to make this transition as expediently as possible.

Epilogue: 4 days later the ants have cleaned up the entire area surrounding the new den, and have moved on.

Lord, I tend to be inclined toward laziness; may the example of these ants inspire me to greater diligence toward our common goal.