Leeches

Once when I was canoeing near my parent's old lake house, I fell in one of the very quiet still inlet areas. The water was only a few inches deep so I was in no danger, but when I pulled my hand out of the muck to stand up, it was covered with baby leeches.

For those of you reading this and eating breakfast, you may want to come back at a later time. Little is more disgusting than a handful of leeches, unless it is a footfull, and I had that too. If I remember correctly, Matt was in the boat at the time, a young Matt, and of course he fell in too, and his hand was also covered with leeches. It is possible that with the passage of time, more leeches were covering us than was strictly the case, but I do remember thinking "If I panic, I will freak Matt out, so I will not panic.... but I may die of being grossed out beyond what I can bear."

Leeches are not dangerous, at least not in the short term. All they do is suck your blood, but they do so painlessly and antiseptically. If you ever needed a good reason not to drink lake water, I discovered an interesting leech fact in a site titled "Lovable Leeches." (In my opinion, this is taking alliteration too far because there is no way one could describe them as lovable, especially in light of the leech fact I discovered there.)

In 1799 when Napoleon's army was marching across the leech infested waters of the Sinai Peninsula, they drank some as they were quite thirsty. As a result, they swallowed leeches which attached to the inside of their throat, and as the leeches swelled with the soldier's blood, the soldier died of asphyxiation. Lovely way to go, don't you think?

Of course, leeches are a double edged sword. If you have a life endangering infection, leeches can very effectively and cleanly suck it out.

They latch onto their victim by suction and then suck blood until they are full, at which point they fall off. By the way, you cannot pull a leech off very easily. They suction on with a substance that is the strength of crazy glue. We tried, naturally, to pull them off but they gleefully kept sucking away with their permanent bond to our capillaries. They were not coming off til they were finished dining. Matt and I, of course, did not want to wait til the 2,098, 764 on our hands and feet were full, so noticing a woman on her porch watching us foundering off her shore, we politely asked if we could borrow some salt. She obliged and we dumped the salt on our bodies, at which point we scraped all the squirming leeches off and the story ends happily.

But since there is little reason for a leech to be on earth unless God intended me to discover an important symbol, I immediately set to finding the message of the leech. The leech lives in very still and quiet waters. It does not like to be disturbed. On the surface, the water is calm and lovely, shallow and of no ostensible threat. Sometimes of course, life is like that water too. All is calm and well, unperturbed. Life is smooth and tranquil. But just beneath that veneer of peace, there often lurks a danger, a trial, something that painlessly can drain your life from you. And those trials can be horrific, and you may not think you will survive.... but sometimes those trials are the very thing that drains away a character flaw, a sin, an infection of the soul that nothing else could touch.

None of us want to reach out with leeches on our soul....and the cure feels worse for a time than the disease....but if it forces you to reach for the salt of heaven, it is perhaps worth it.

Hebrews 9:14
How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!