It is hard to look at a sunset without stopping to appreciate the utter beauty of it. To then connect that beauty to God’s beauty is an appropriate response of worship. The beauty that we see in God’s creation is only a reflection of His own beauty and majesty.
Three hour-long sunset during the summer soltice in Alaska; taken at midnight
(courtesy of my daughter, Nellie, and her husband, Dustin Vail, 2008 )
My wife and I sometimes try to name all the colors that we see in a sunset. There are problems with that: I’m not an artist, so my vocabulary of color names is limited to something like the 24-pack of Crayolas™ (remember "periwinkle"?). God’s palette is much richer than my vocabulary. Another problem is my lack of perception of all the subtle nuances of color, one ever so slightly different from another. And then, as soon as I try to describe the colors in one single cloud, the colors have all changed as the angle of the sun shifts down or as the cloud itself shifts.
Sunsets are a dynamic art; kind of like those little tubular kaleidoscopes you looked through as a kid, the colors and patterns constantly changing as you twist the end of the cardboard tube. Beauty upon beauty. Sunsets are like that. God is like that … beauty upon beauty if we will stop to notice. Lifestyle worship is about stopping to notice the beauty, the attributes and nature of God—how He impacts our lives, how we don’t deserve it—and then responding appropriately in praise and thanksgiving to Him . . . lavish praise, free and unbridled praise.
Did you know that the LORD is listening and hears when you praise Him? . . . And that He responds? . . . And that it makes Him smile? . . . The Bible says:
“For the LORD takes delight in his people …
Psalm 145 is like a hymn of praise to God, written by King David nearly 3000 years ago. Praise is very much a verb, an action. Our English word, “praise”, is from an Old French word meaning “to prize”.
Check out Psalm 145. As you read through it, notice all the verbs, I will:
The sound is pervading, it’s unrelenting . . . surreal. Heard from a distance, one imagines some kind of industrial equipment humming along; or maybe a mass cheer from a far off football stadium—a cheer that doesn’t end. Up close, it sounds like thousands of rattlesnakes in the trees. It’s been thirteen years in the making and now one month of noise-making. We’ve been invaded by the Thirteen Year Cicada.
The love calls begin at daybreak and end at dark . . . until the next daybreak when it starts all over again. Unless you happen to hear an individual cicada (a.k.a. “locust”) zip by or on a branch just above you, what you hear is the mass of cicadas—all doing their thing at once without a break.
Julie and I recently took a jaunt down to our creek to look at some wildflowers. We began to notice the classic empty “shells” of locusts on tree trunks and plant leaves. But it wasn’t the occasional ones that you see every summer in the Ozarks. They were everywhere! And a couple of days later the noise started. It is so constant that the mind unconsciously ignores it—selecting it out as unimportant background--until someone points it out to you. And then you hear it and you are amazed. And it doesn’t go away.
Finally, I saw a live one on our picnic table. The most striking feature is the almost glowing brick-red eyes. I didn’t remember our regular locusts with those eyes. A quick internet search told me that this was not the regular Dog Day Locust that we have each year (so called because they emerge during the hot, dog-days of July and August). This was the first week of May. I determined by its markings that we had Magicicada tredecula. There are basically three species of periodical or cyclical cicadas in the U.S. All three species have a 13-year and a 17-year version of the same insect.
Weirder than those eyes is the fact that these little guys and gals have been waiting since 1998 for this big moment. One month of non-stop flirting and mating. (They do stop at night, apparently, but non-stop in the sense that apparently the adult stage doesn’t even bother to eat) They’re here for one thing only. The noise is from the massive congregation of males calling to the females, trying to attract a mate--like thugs catcalling and talkin’ trash at the girls walking down the street. Check out a wonderful video short from the BBC with David Attenborough of Planet Earth fame.
The males have two little flaps on their segmented bellies covering a hollow chamber. Stretched across the Inside of the chamber is a thin membrane like the skin of a drum, with muscles that it can use to vibrate the drum to make its sound. The female, on the other hand, has no such structure; she only makes a clicking sound with her wings to indicate that she is hot to trot and likes what she hears from her bug-eyed Romeo. After they mate, she uses a saw-like appendage on the end of her belly to cut a couple of slits into a nearby tree stem. She then lays her eggs in a neat row in each slit.
Dime-size emergence holes under our water oak tree.
The eggs will hatch after a few days, and tiny larval versions crawl out of the slit and drop to the ground. They burrow about one foot deep into the earth and start sucking sap from tree roots for the next thirteen summers, buried in the dark, not hearing a sound. God only knows (I mean that literally) how each cicada knows when the thirteen years are up and it’s time for everyone to emerge again.
Geographic range of Brood XIX
It turns out there are different groups or “broods” of these bugs around the country. Each brood might be dispersed over many states in the Upper South and Midwest. Another brood may only be in a couple of states on the Atlantic Seaboard. All of the individual cicadas of a certain brood emerge at the same time: every thirteen or seventeen years, depending on which brood. Ours is Brood Nineteen (XIX) which stretches from the Gulf Coast to Indiana and from Oklahoma to Virginia. [map from Cicadia Mania] The last emergence was in 1998; the next will be in 2024—clean as clockwork. There is a brood of 17-yr cicadas in New England which were first noted by European colonists in the early 1600’s. Four hundred years later the same brood is still emerging every 17 years. They’ve been doing that, no doubt, since the last glaciers retreated from New England ten thousand years ago or so.
Thirteen summers … thirteen winters … thirteen springs and falls … that’s a long time to wait for . . . well, you know. No wonder they make such a racket!
[all photos by Bob Holland; first video by Julie Holland]
Trained as an ecologist and later as a plant pathologist (sick plants). Worked for years doing research on tree diseases, then plant diseases in general for the Cooperative Extension Service. Then it was the landscape maintenance business for many years, until I left to pastor a church for five years. Now my wife and I are running a dog boarding business called Ernie Boudreaux's Doggie Dude Ranch. We also have HollandWildflowerFarm.com where we sell seeds for native plants. I recently returned to work at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville where I conduct research on soybean diseases. We have two grown daughters and sons-in-law, plus an "adopted" Korean son and his new bride. I play the mandolin among other things.
