Key Text
"Remember also
your Creator in the days of your youth." Ecclesiastes 12:1a (WEB)
Lesson
What do you think of when you see a firefly: a warm summer’s
eve? sitting on the back porch or by the lake? how calming it is to watch the
faint flickering lights? If you have ever had similar thoughts you are not
alone. I believe God gave us fireflies for this very reason. If you were to
guess how long fireflies live what would you guess: all summer? half the
summer?
In fact, adult fireflies live for only a couple of weeks!
The fireflies you see at the end of the summer are not the same ones as you see
at the beginning. It may not be a big surprise to you that they don’t
live very long. Most insects have a short life-span. But the real surprise is
how long they live as larvae before the adult stage. How long would you guess
they spend as larvae? If you guessed two years you would be right!
Try to imagine that! If human lives worked that way we would
spend about 50 years as children and 18 years as adults! It would be so hard to
have to wait that long to be grown up. As our lives are sometimes it seems hard
to weight only 18 years or so to be fully grown. When we are
teenagers we feel like we cannot wait another month to grow up.
Perhaps God gave us an example in the firefly to remind us
youth doesn’t last so long in comparison to adulthood. God could have made us
like the firefly, but he didn’t. We need to remember to enjoy our youth. We
need to remember to learn as much as we can before we have so much
responsibility. We need to learn to enjoy the opportunities youth brings. Everything will
happen in the right time.
Most importantly, we need to remember to build a relationship
with God in our youth. Even if we are no longer youth, the sooner in our lives we turn to
God, the better. As King Solomon pointed out in Ecclesiastes 12:1,
we ought to remember to start our lives off with God as young as we can. The
firefly spends two years preparing for its short adult life. The more time we
spend preparing for God’s purpose in our life by staying close to him the
better our relationship with him will be.
Questions
Why is it hard to wait to be grown up sometimes?
Why did God give us childhood?
Do you wish you could have been made an adult and skipped
childhood?
Sources
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Firefly
Written by David F. Garner
Photo Credit: Amanjeev via www.flickr.com under a CC 2.0 License.
Written by David F. Garner
Photo Credit: Amanjeev via www.flickr.com under a CC 2.0 License.