Aphids and Lightning Bugs Are Out and Feeding

The wild strawberry is the most flexible and useful ground cover, also serving as food for birds and critters, creating a green mat enhanced by the ruby red fruit.

I saw scaly insects on roses, but lo, they were tiny aphids, which enrage gardeners. I was ready to flick them away when I remembered - "They are food. Don't starve the beneficial insects."

As if planned from the beginning of time, the lightning bugs began flashing at night. They prey on the aphids - or the glow worm infants do. Also, daisies began to bloom, a motel for the fly who lays eggs near aphids. 

Everything is blooming at once, including the Poke Weed, Joe Pye Weed, and Butterfly Weed. Poke is too aggressive for the Rose Garden, so it is confined to the backyard, where each plant is a bird feeder, providing berries for over 60 species of birds. 

I am enjoying periods of sitting on the front patio and driveway, snipping away at grass that wants to mar the delight of Caladiums. Mechanical scissors snip too much too fast, so I use cheap ones and sometimes extra-long ones. Snipping grass and other small weeds is a bit like being a barber, trimming the hair that detracts. It is also like editing an essay or book. Most people want every precious word saved, but editing cuts out extra words, wonky neologisms, and the toxic danger of edu-speak, the language used in the education business, as useless as pig-Latin.

One student thanked me for adding another word to the list in the education lobby - edu-speak. I was flattered.

This is why the foaming-at-the-mouth Fulleroids and Willow Creekers never mention Schmauk.

The editing I am doing in the garden is also like discerning Christian doctrine. Snipping away at little dead-ends in Christian doctrine and practice can prevent massive areas of false doctrine and spiritual abuse (like hazing). The best example is the Calvinist spin that removes the efficacy of the Word from the Scriptures and the Sacraments.

If the Word is not effective (or efficacious),

1. The Holy Spirit is separated from the Word, contrary to Isaiah 55:8ff and a host of passages, including the rebuke of the Rich Man in Luke - "They have Moses and the Prophets. Let them hear them!"
2. Programs are needed to bring people in and make them happy.
3. The Gospel must be either reasonable, appealing, or germane - preferably all three.
4. Copying a growing church will allow the copycat parish to grow as well.
5. If a church is not growing, it is due to the personality of the pastor, who is probably not dressed like a pimp or smiling like a used car salesman. 
6. If people are not connected to a church activity they enjoy, whether needed or not, they will not stay as members.
7. The best way to have a thriving sect is to train all the leaders in Enthusiasm (the Word separate from the Holy Spirit), ridicule the King James Version, ignore Luther, and criticize the "boring and irrelevant" Book of Concord.
8. To make #7 work, all dissenters must be ejected from the ministry and from congregations where certain laity disturb and hurt the work of Zion.

 The LCMS-WELS-ELS-CLC-ELDONUTs answer, "Yes! Whisper low so we can get more members to pay off our lawsuits and victims."