By Melissa Kline
The cicadas have come. This year areas of the Midwest are experiencing the simultaneous hatching of two broods, an event that has not occurred for 200 years. Billions of red-eyed, black-bodied insects are expected to emerge.
Here, in southern Missouri, only one long-awaited brood is hatching. Even so, the pulsing thrum of the synchronized chorus of the adults has risen to a roar. I regularly brush the heavy, slow-flying insects away from my face during afternoon runs while the empty shells of molting nymphs cling to trees and crunch beneath my sneakers. On more than one occasion I have picked abandoned casings and crystalline wings from the dryer lint screen, trophies washed from my children’s pockets.
Thirteen years ago, when this year’s brood hatched and burrowed into the soil, I had no children. Now I have four. Since then, my husband and I have lived in three states, planted dozens of trees, and said goodbye to too many friends. How many wraith-like cicada nymphs, translucent in their paleness, have we walked over in that time? I never once thought of them. How have they endured their weary years of darkness?
Lately, I have been asking myself similar questions: How do I endure? When darkness lingers, and year after year nothing seems to change for the better? How, in a world fraught with distraction, busyness, and the pressure to perform? It is easy to feel defeated. With the honesty of David in the Psalms, I wrestle and lament.
In my friend’s front yard, a maple tree soars 30 feet into the sky. It towers above the low ridge of her house, its crown basking in the golden radiance of the sun while its roots grip the blackness of the earth. For 13 years the maple’s leaves, like veiny, green fingers, caught the essence of noonday and shunted it down to where the nymphs waited. The cicadas feasted on its sap. Encased in darkness, they fed on light, and as they fed, the substance of their being matured.
But that is a cicada and a maple tree. What of me?
“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’” (Matthew 26:26, ESV)
The Lord Jesus Christ is our Tree of Life. His crown reaches into heaven; His root was buried in the ground. He is the light upon which we Christians are to feed, and it is His life-giving blood offered to us as drink. Each time we bow in prayer, meditate on His words, and commune with His saints at the Eucharistic table, we are nourished by His life.
Without Him, we wither. We lose hope, and we die.
The cicada’s entire life is a patient movement back toward light. So must mine be. In defiance to the pressing darkness, I am learning to cling to Christ with the tenacity of a cicada nymph clinging to a maple root. He is sustaining me by His powerful Word, and I am learning to confidently know that Light will come again. It is a truth beautifully captured in the Anglican prayer of consecration:
Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.
Even as I wait for that coming day, a new, renewed creation is beginning to emerge.
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Melissa Kline is the author of the middle-grade adventure novel, Through the Keeper's Door and a contributing writer for StoryWarren.com. She writes from the beautiful Missouri Ozarks where she lives with her husband and their four kids. Together they spend their summers gardening and their winters exploring the local hills and hollows.–––––––––––