Fruit Flies

I don’t let my house get too overly messy usually.  I used to do this, but it has really gone down since I married someone that likes cleanliness and order.  Recently, with my back acting up, I have let my house get a little messier than usual.  The dishes may stay in the sink for the whole day, the counter may not be clear.  The biggest mistake that I have made were the bananas on the top of my refrigerator.  These bananas were overly ripe and started the rotting process.  Well, during this process, fruit flies have taken over my kitchen.  I am pretty sure they originally came in when I purchased apples from the orchard and peeled and canned them.  The orchard had a lot of fruit flies and the apples that I did not can, I believe brought them in originally.  They then grew in the bananas that were rotting on the top of my fridge that I had forgotten about.  Now, I have set fruit fly traps everywhere and am catching them left and right.  It seems that it doesn’t matter how many I catch though, there are more that show up every day.

While in high school, we did an experiment with fruit flies.  More an observation than an experiment.  We purchased fruit flies from a lab (why anyone would purchase them on purpose still makes me question).  Then we put them to sleep with ether, and were each given two fruit flies and some gunk for the bottom of our test tube.  We observed the flies through their stages, egg, larva etc, it was all really rather nasty to think that could happen in your kitchen or in the fruit that you eat.  Then we would put all the flies back to sleep and see how many had red eyes, how many had black eyes, same thing with curved and smooth wings.  We would then make one of those squares that show where certain things were introduced- if you did it you would remember they were called Punnett Squares. 

Using Punnett Squares you can work out the different probabilities that children of the parents in the square will have particular geno and pheno types (and I thought I would never use my high school bio class - :D ).  It looks just like a grid with one set of letters up one side and the other across the side.  Then you take the letter from the top and put it into each square and then you can see the different things that could happen with the offspring of the parents.  This was one of my favorite parts of biology because I learned how to have blue-eyed children. 

You could see during these observations, where the traits came from and we got to observe them growing.  Although I still hate fruit flies to this day, it really made me think about how things happen in our lives.  We let one little piece of sin into our lives (like the little fruit fly) and it then begins to find other sin, mate and reproduce.  Most of our sins that we have “let” come in are so small you would think it could not do any harm.  They find something to breed in, to fester in, to grow in, and then before you know it, you are infested with sin. 

It is important to keep track of everything that can cause decay and allow an infestation.  Maybe there is a clump of bananas, something that you haven’t dealt with and keep pushing aside, maybe that something you have pushed aside and aren’t wanting to deal with it.  It is very possible that that little something is sitting and rotting away, festering, allowing something to grow and reproduce in your life. 

The Bible tells us in Matthew 5:27-30 about how if a piece of your body offends you, to cut it off.  Jesus says “... It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”  Maybe we need to evaluate our lives and see what parts we need to get rid of.  What parts are allowing sin to fester.  If there is something that we keep pushing down that we need to deal with, please deal with it.  I didn’t deal with an issue in my life and it caused me to have a lot of sin in my life.  Until I was able to deal with it through God and not hold resentment towards Him any longer was I able to move on and become closer and more in love with Him.