I’ve seen three hatchings of termites. 

The first was inside a house, a swarm of thousands of tiny black bodies. It soon became clear that they had a mission: to go to a door or a window and try to escape. The flying mass soon became a crawling force as they left their frosty wings glimmering on the floor and windowsills. 

“It’s flying ants,” the homeowner said, after I suggested they might have a termite colony open for business.

I think maybe the owner was just in denial and didn’t want to pay the Orkin man.

The second was inside a school in a classroom. These termites decided that the window in the classroom wasn’t a good enough spot to make their grand escape. Oh no, they had to go down the hallway and around the corner to an exterior door. They found their way, drawn to the light.

I, on the other hand, ended up with a chunk of a pest control bill. 

(In my past life, I was a high school principal. I’ve plunged toilets in boys’ locker rooms, run network cables in hot attics, and sprinkled sawdust on top of puke when there wasn’t enough money to purchase the good puke cleaner. Those desiccated chunks swept up fine, just like the termites. Being a principal is not always a desk job.)

The third hatching was at a different school, inside a math classroom. These termites had more sense and went directly to the window in the classroom. Maybe they’d been taking notes and had measured the distance carefully, it being a math class.

Why can’t people have the same innate sense as a lowly termite? We say we want the light, but if that means a fundamental change must happen to us, as it does with the termites losing their wings, then we would prefer to stay hidden away in the dark gnawing our old rotten wood.

Light draws. It does more than just beckon with its warmth. It shows what was hidden by the darkness, bringing understanding and insight. When we stumble and fall in dark places, we long for the light to show us the way out.

Light can bring us to a new home.

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

John 3:19-21

We want to keep our infestations of the heart hidden away. Maybe we’re embarrassed about their ugliness. Maybe we feel guilty about the hurt we’ve caused someone else. Or maybe we like things the way they are, stubborn creatures of habit that we are. We don’t want to change.

It’s a sad thing that termites are “braver” than human beings could ever hope to be.

If only doing the right thing could come as instinctually to people as going to the light is to the pesty termite.

I guess we are more like the first homeowner, living in denial, our home rotten at the core.

The Good News is the price has already been paid.

All we have to do is look to the Light.