A Bed Bug Parable

Female bed bug.

When you travel as much as we do, somewhere in the back of your mind you know it is inevitable that at some point you will encounter bed bugs. You hope not, but it's a very real possibility.

That day arrived for us this summer when we stayed at a hotel while on a work-related trip. The very first night in the room, as we were getting ready to turn out the light, we noticed a couple of small insects in the bed. Suspicious about this, we checked the bug in our bed against pictures of bed bugs on the Internet and there was a match.

We rushed down to hotel reception to alert them, and they quickly moved us to another room. But as we packed up to move, we noticed that numerous bugs were emerging out of the mattress and pillows right in front of us!

I know about the danger of bed bug infestations moving with travelers, so although we changed rooms, we feared that somehow a few might have gotten into our luggage during the couple of hours we had bags in that room. Or maybe that room could be infested, too. So the next day the hotel called a specially trained dog to come and check our new room and our luggage. The dog sniffed everything but did not find any bed bugs. That really put our minds at ease and so for the rest of the week we did not worry.

However, after Andrew had already returned home a few days before me, on the last morning as I was packing up to leave, I found a bed bug in the bed. This meant that all week my belongings had been in an infested room, and I had also been sleeping in an infested bed!

This meant I could not bring anything from the hotel into the building where we live until I had washed and dried everything that could be washed and dried (including myself), hand-inspected every item of which I could see every surface clearly, throw away some things, and left everything else outside until we could buy a special device that would allow us to bake these items up to 120 F degrees, including our suitcases, shoes, etc., to kill any hidden bugs or eggs, since they are insecticide resistant.

Because Andrew had returned ahead of me, before we knew that our second hotel room was also infested, he had already brought his things into our apartment. So we spent all weekend cleaning and washing and checking everything in the apartment, and had to order special linens for our bed that will guard against bed bug infestations. This process was utterly exhausting and took basically two whole days.

Soon the evidence of our stay with the bugs in the hotel was apparent, as we broke out into a delayed allergic reaction to their bites, with painful, itchy welts all over.

I am not one to see a spiritual parallel in everything, but as I had to closely examine every single item from my suitcase to look for the tiniest white eggs or bugs, wash everything in the hottest setting, and even throw away some items that couldn't be washed or examined closely enough, I started thinking about two analogies: 1. The Israelites, who were mandated by God to cleanse the promised land of every people group who worshiped any false gods so that the Israelites would not be seduced away from their relationship with God (and because they didn't, they were); 2. And the need to eradicate every speck of sin in our lives so that even the smallest sins are not able to gain a foothold and gradually infest other areas of our life with darkness.

The thing with bed bugs is you cannot let even one egg or one bug into your house. It just takes a couple of these tiny insects to infiltrate everything, from books to picture frames; they can live under the baseboards along the walls and even inside electrical outlets. The females lay 5-10 eggs a day. And worse yet, they can live up to 300 days without feeding on human blood -- the only thing they consume. So even if you quarantine an object, you basically must seal it off for an entire year to ensure any bugs inside are truly dead. The cost of cleaning and preventing an infestation is high. The cost of dealing with an entrenched infestation would be much, much higher.

I just kept thinking about how it is the same way with sin: we must examine every aspect of our lives to root out even the tiniest bits of resistance to God and seflishness, or the potential is there for these things to create a foothold and spread, entrenching themselves in our lives and making it harder and harder to allow God to cleanse us and free us from their grip.

I hope that we never have to face bed bugs again, and I hope that none of you have to, either. And I pray that in the same way, we are all able to stay vigilant about areas of our lives where we need to do some cleaning and rooting out, so we can live in the peace of Jesus.