Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: SNOOZE (07/20/17)
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TITLE: A lesson from ants | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
07/21/17 -
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An ant was working its way across the greying stubble on his chin. When it detoured toward his open mouth Jessie poked the snoozing slumberer and giggled as he opened one eye and stared at her.
“There’s an ant crawling into your mouth,” she said.
Her grandfather lazily rubbed his jaw and swished the ant off. In doing so he inadvertently knocked his bowl of popcorn off his lap and onto the ground. A small stream of harvester ants going by stormed in circles as they made sense of the buttery winfall.
“Look,” Jessie called as she crouched down to watch. “The ants are stealing your popcorn.”
Grandfather moved his feet and took his place beside her. “Must be God talking to me,” he said.
“Why is God talking to you through the ants?” Jessie asked.
Grandfather rubbed his chin and smiled. “Well a long time ago, there was this man who was smarter than anyone else and he said in God’s Word that the ants could teach us things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, he said, ‘Take a lesson from the ants, you lazybones. Learn from their ways and become wise!’ Even though no one makes them they all work hard together to get food in the summer so they can eat it in the winter. He said if we spend too much time snoozing then we’ll find ourselves short of what we need when we need it.”
“Where are they taking your popcorn?”
Grandfather hunched over and followed the trail of ants as they disappeared under the front stairs. “It looks like they’re moving in under my house.” He brushed aside a flower petal that hid part of the parade of ants. “It only takes one queen to dig herself a little space and then she can lay up to a thousand eggs a day to get the workers she needs. The ants build tunnels and places to store their food and they clean up and help each other. No one gets to snooze in an ant colony.”
“Wow. I’d like to go down an ant tunnel,” Jessie said. “How far down do they go?”
Grandfather straightened up and winced as he loosened his back. “See how tall I am? If I stood in a hole next to the ant tunnels they would go down deeper than me. The ants make holes the size of your pencil crayon and keep building it bigger and bigger as more ants get hatched each week. And each kind of ants makes their own design of nest without any instructions that we know of.”
Jessie lay down on the edge of the stairs and looked down on the slowly moving column. “How do they make all those tunnels in the dark with no one telling them what to do?”
Grandfather rubbed his whiskers. “Good question. I guess that’s why God told us to learn from them. Somehow, they know what God made them to do and they just do it all together.”
“Kind of a like a big family?”
“Exactly, kind of like a big family. There might be five thousand of those critters down there.”
“Will they build so many tunnels that your house will fall down?”
Grandfather grabbed hold of the front stairs railing and gave it a gentle shake. It rocked a little. “I think I’m figuring out the lesson from those ants. Your grandmother’s been telling me for months that these stairs are wobbly. I think I’ve got some work to do.”
“Of course you can, Sugar-bear,” grandfather said. “Those ants aren’t going to find us slacking off.” Grandfather led the way to his work shed and grabbed his hammer. “Do you know what we’re going to do after we finish fixing up that railing and all those stairs?”
“Ice-cream?” Jessie hinted hopefully.
“Of course, ice-cream,” grandfather said. “And then we have something else to do once we eat all the ice-cream.”
“Swing on the porch swing?” Jessie guessed.
“Of course, we’ll swing on the porch swing,” grandfather agreed.
“But then what are we going to do?”
Jessie frowned and watched grandfather driving the nails into place. “I give up. What?”
“We’re going to take a snooze, of course.”
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There was one area where it seemed there was some dialogue missing - where the grandpa says,"of course you can..."