Crickets and PB&J.

For me, everything in life finds an audience with crickets. Crickets. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yes, also peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When a bad day turns into a bad week, gains speed and becomes a bad month, flexes its new muscles into a bad year; when it seeks out to define you and give you a new name and identity, crickets can nearly always save the day. You see, crickets just don't care, and I don't think they live very long either, but that doesn't bother them. They just wait till dark then sing or chirp or whatever it is you call the noise they make and are apparently ok with that. Crickets sing (we'll call it singing) because they can and because in some sense I guess they figure that is what they are supposed to do, what they were made to do. They probably have no knowledge of a creator or of fast food or cars or that their life is short and insignificant. They don't know this. They sing. And they are fine with that. They die and if you're good you can put them on a hook and catch a fish. What am I talking about? How could I gain any comfort from that?
Crickets help me realize that God really is that big. He created the insignificant cricket and the amoeba for that matter for his good pleasure. He creates the blueprint for, creates a diet for, determines a lifespan for, and builds a home for the paltry cricket. And he says that he loves me.
That usually saves the day, most of the time even a week.
Eventually my sadly garden-variety faith becomes meager faith in the God that created the cricket. The God that says the things he says. This is when I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Then I realize.
A mind thought of a way to turn sand into glass by setting it on fire and devoloped a machine to mass produce this into a suitable container. He met with another mind who grasped the idea of plastics or metals and molds or presses and that mind mass produced a lid for the glass jar. Another mind cultivated the peanut (George Washington Carver), then another mind crushed up his idea added oils and preservatives and created peanut butter. Then comes the grapes, sugars, gelatin, etc. and the mind that figured all that out. At some "New Idea" convention the minds come together with their varied expertise and make some corny joke aobut great minds thinking alike and lo and behold we have a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly. If I am really feeling desperate and lost I also think of the bread bag, twist-ties, and sliced bread and the minds involved in that. A lone tear falls on the plate.
How much more complex is my liver or my knee-cap or even my fingernail than a jelly jar? And he fashioned me after himself.
God created an incredible mind. God's existence is proved in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. His love for me (he says that he does) is shown in the great and vast difference there is between that cricket and myself. Despite my shortcomings, he prefers me. He beckons. You are weak and weary, come and rest.
Then I eat the sandwich and listen for the crickets because it's usually really late by then.