Well Designed Snails

Each one of us can learn about God’s way of working with us from a fresh water snail that is often preyed upon by crayfish.

When life is easy and there are no crayfish around to threaten the snail, it usually lives only three to five months and grows to only one sixteenth of an inch. But if crayfish are around to threaten and eat the snails, they will grow two to three times as large and live two to three times as long. This not only helps ensure that the snail population continues, but it also means that there are more snails reproducing when their population is threatened.

Despite their seeming unimportance, our Creator has designed snails to play an important role in maintaining the environment. For this reason, and because He made them, He has provided snails with the ability to prosper under stress. They do not succeed by their own effort; snails do nothing more than what the Creator made them for.

The lessons we can learn from these snails are easy to speak but sometimes hard to live. First of all, if the Creator cares this much about snails, then not one of us is so unimportant that our Creator ignores us. And when life is difficult for us, our help does not lie in our own meager powers but in the power of the One who made us and sent His Son for our salvation.

Colossians 1:9-10
“For this cause we also, since the day we heard [it], do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God…”

Prayer:
Lord, since You have walked this Earth, You know the problems that come with life. Teach me to depend more and more on Your sufficient power and less and less on my own powers. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Ref: “Snail’s pace picks up if hunted; it gets bigger and lives longer.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 24, 1990. Photo: Fresh water snails by Jess Van Dyke CCA 3.0 US