When just about anyone was small, I am sure they passed by a construction zone and didn’t see front end loaders and buckets. They didn’t see cranes and graders. They saw – Dinosaurs! Mostly brontosaurus, sure, but also other kinds of armor plated monsters. At least that is how it USED to be. If you drive up Route 3 from the south, you might have a different perspective. While our normal, old familiar dinosaur friends are still around, there are all these machines that are busy yanking out trees. They have pinchers to grab a tree and mandibles to bite it off. There are even strange, squat and blocky machines on 6 or 8 tires that have sets of special grabbing and digging claws for yanking out huge stumps. Some of them wiggle along the ground like a centipede. It amazes me how efficient we humans are at quickly turning a chunk of wooded wonderland into what looks like ground zero of a meteor strike!

I guess I really shouldn’t be amazed. The people who designed these machines just mimicked the handiwork of the Master. I bet buckets and loaders really were patterned after dinosaurs. After all, if Dinosaurs were alive today they would have the perfect shape to do the work we use their mechanical counterparts for. And when someone needs to invent a way to whack down trees, well, how do bugs do it? Because for all their clanking and smoke bellowing, these modern day things with mandibles, pinchers, and claws look like giant bugs! Straight out of nature, and just about perfectly designed for the job. So many people say there is no God, but then they copy his ideas. Surely man’s mind could design something better than random natural selection, right? (hah!)

There’s a certain kind of bug I want to consider in today’s bulletin. Most people don’t think of it as a bug, but I do. It lives in water and has a pair of large claws. It has an exoskeleton (that means it doesn’t have bones inside, like people do, but it’s outside skin is what we would consider bone.) It can grow to over 6 feet in length! That’s a mighty big bug! During the Revolutionary War, British prisoners kept in Maine were forced to gather them and eat them. They got so sick of eating them night after night, the prisoners threatened to riot. Early colonists would walk along beaches and gather them up for food, they were so plentiful at one time, but they did this ONLY in times of crop failure or general famine. The bug I am describing was considered the poor man’s fare, food for the desperate or starving. Indians would catch them and use them as bait to fish with, since even Indians thought poorly of consuming them.

You know what I’m talking about? Something that you drop in boiling water and turns red when cooked. Something that wasn’t even considered for a menu item until the 1940’s, and since then has become one of the higher priced meals anywhere. Lobster.

I was thinking of lobster the other day, when I saw someone burned and maimed from a terrorist attack. The person’s skin was red, like a cooked lobster. I was thinking how once upon a time human life was considered sacred. How once the very old were revered as statesmen, as story tellers, as historians, fountains of advice and knowledge. How babies were once considered to be precious, the future, the renewal of life. How people didn’t murder babies, and didn’t push old people into “homes”, out of sight and out of mind, because they are obsolete or inconvenient. How people’s attitudes of hundreds of years time can change overnight. With lobsters, it’s probably a good thing. But when did people go from being creations in the image of God to something that can be simply discarded, lightly killed without remorse, something to be squashed underfoot? When did people become bugs?

Randy