Wasps

When I was eight, I learned that God has a dark sense of humor — and it comes with wings.

It happened in someone else’s backyard, which feels important, because bad things rarely happen at your own house. Disaster requires an audience.

I was on a swing — Zips sneakers, tube socks pulled high like my shins had something to prove. The sun was hot, the air thick, and my only goal in life was to see how high I could go before physics called 911.

And then, because I was eight and believed in magic and stupidity in equal measure, I jumped.

I don’t know what I expected — a soft landing, applause, maybe divine approval.
What I got was pain.
A thousand electric shocks erupted all over my body. My legs. My arms. My scalp. My underwear.

I remember thinking, So this is how I die — in Fruit of the Looms and questionable sneakers.

Turns out, I had landed on a wasp nest.

They didn’t hesitate. They organized. It was a coordinated military strike.
I screamed.
Adults came running.
There was chaos.
I was crying, half-naked, covered in welts and humiliation, while adults plucked wasps out of my socks and T-shirt like demented flower girls.

It was my first real experience of suffering. The first time my brain learned that pain isn’t just something that happens to other people on TV. It happens to you.

And because I was eight — innocent, dramatic, and a little theologically confused — I looked up at the sky and asked, “Why?”

Why would God make wasps?
Why am I the target?
Why me?

That was my first why me, though it wouldn’t be my last.
It turns out that once you learn to ask that question, you spend a lifetime repeating it.

Why do people need to suffer?
Why do bad things happen?
Why does the world feel so unfair?
Why can’t life just—once—go according to plan?

And here’s what I know now:
Maybe God doesn’t send the wasps.
Maybe He just sits next to us while we’re being stung, whispering, I’m here. I know. Hold still. Let Me help.

Because pain isn’t proof that God left.
It’s usually the place He shows up.

That day, after the chaos died down, I was wrapped in a towel and told, “You’re okay now.”
And I wasn’t. But I would be.
And maybe that’s the point.

We spend our lives trying to avoid the nests — the messy, buzzing, unpredictable parts of life.
We mow around them.
We build fences.
We tell ourselves that faith means never getting stung.

But faith isn’t that.
Faith is what happens when you’re lying on the grass, covered in stings, realizing you can’t fix it yourself — and asking for help anyway.

I still hate wasps.
Still flinch at their sound.
Now that I have the time to think about that day, I do more often than I should.
Because it was the first time I learned that pain, like grace, always leaves a mark — and sometimes, that mark is what reminds you you’re still alive.

The real miracle isn’t that God protects us from pain.
Maybe it’s that He stays with us inside it.
Even when the wasps are still flying.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.”

- 2 Corinthians 12:9