God has installed some really neat cooperative systems in his world. In his ecological plan, various living things often dovetail into mutually beneficial relationships. For instance, the blossom furnishes nectar for the bee while the bee pollinates the blossom. For years I’ve felt I had this kind of symbiotic relationship with the lizards in my back yard. They seem to welcome all kinds of bugs in their diet. I’ve noticed that as long as the lizard population is up, the bug count is down. I furnish a lawn and garden which attract bugs. They eat them. It works well.
I consider the dozens of lizards that live on our back fence to be my friends. While I’ve never had a one-on-one friendship with any particular lizard, there are actually two of them which I remember rather well. My older grandson found one of them dead several years ago. After burial he properly marked its grave with a crayon inscription: “Scaly died on Thursday.”
The other lizard is a more recent acquaintance, a baby gecko about an inch and a half long and very much alive, which went scooting under the couch late one night last week. Have you ever tried to find a baby lizard in a hide-a-bed couch? (Fortunately, no one was sleeping in it.) There are at least a million places it can hide, and only one of them is necessary. Have you ever tried to go to sleep at night, knowing there is a lizard loose in the house? Don’t. Your imagination will get the better of you. The story ends happily. The lizard was caught several nights later and sent back to the fence.
This episode gave new meaning to Solomon’s words, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Several days is far too long a time to live in the same house with a lizard. Summer is his season, the time he should be in the yard catching bugs. That little lizard, inexperienced as he was, got God’s arrangement confused.
Solomon wrote that God “has made everything beautiful in its time,” and “there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live.” Solomon was on to something that we need. It’s part of God’s plan that we should be happy doing good as we fit appropriately into the time and space he has given us. The lizard hiding in the hide-a-bed teaches us what not to be: out of our proper environment, and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bee and the blossom also have a lesson for us: right time, right place, be happy, do good, share, and help each other.