There’s something making me itch,” Betty Lou complained as she came in from play one afternoon.
“Where is the itch?” Mother asked.
“Right here, back of my ear.”
Mother looked back of the girl’s ear and found a tick. “It’s a tick,” Mother exclaimed. “Don’t touch it. I’ll get it out right away.” She found a piece of cotton, dipped it in kerosene and sopped the itchy place several times until she was sure the tick was dead. Then she pulled it out carefully and threw it into the fire.
“You see,” explained Mother, “the tick burrows its head under the skin so it can get some of the blood from your body. I told you not to touch it because if you try to pull a tick off while it is alive it will only cling the tighter; and while you are pulling, it may leave some of its poison in your body. Although they are only tiny creatures, ticks are dangerous, for they sometimes carry disease germs that make people very sick.”
“He’s a bad bug, isn’t he, Mother? Why did God make bad bugs?” asked Betty Lou.
It was a question that gave the family plenty to talk about that evening. Linda, thought she answered the question by saying, “God made everything, didn’t He? So He must have made good bugs and bad bugs.”
“I don’t see how that can be,” Harold objected. “Didn’t God say that everything He made was good?”
“That’s right, Harold. God never made anything bad,” said Mother. “He never made an ugly or useless thing. Even the serpent was beautiful before it told the lies that Satan put into its mouth. After man sinned, some of the animals became wild and ferocious; and, not satisfied with the grass and other plants God had given them for food, they began to eat one another. Some of the birds, too, began to fight and destroy one another, instead of living on the fruits and nuts and grains. Satan has tried to spoil everything that God has made, because he hates God and because he hates us.”
Daddy went into the library and brought out a big book he had been reading. It told about huge animals and reptiles that lived before the Flood. Their bones have been found in the earth, where they were buried when the mountains were thrown up by the raging wind and water.
“What animals!” Linda exclaimed. “Are there any such animals living anywhere on the earth now?”
“No,” Daddy answered, “not one of them is left. God must have allowed these huge animals to die in order to protect man from harm that they might do him. Undoubtedly they were wonderful creatures when God made them, but sin changed them into beasts that brought terror to man.”
“Betty, there will be no bad bugs in heaven to carry poison and disease, as ticks and mosquitoes so often do now.”
Daddy read the wonderful description of the new earth from the Bible. Harold asked, “Will there be lions in the new earth? In one chapter it says that there will be no lions there, and in the other chapter it says that the lion and the lamb will lie down together.”
“It’s this way, son,” came Daddy’s answer; “there’ll be no wild, ravenous lions as we know them now; but there will be friendly, harmless lions, the kind God made in the beginning.”
Happy Home Stories, by Ella M. Robinson, Teach Services, Inc., pages 49–51.