Bedbugs biting Americans from coast to coast

"Numbers of bed bugs are doubling each year in the US, UK, and Europe. Did you know that bed bugs Bite?"

Bedbugs are back?! Why are bedbugs back? What does it mean? More on that in a minute, but first, the news:

Bedbugs have been plaguing people all across the United States lately. Thought of as a quaint and bygone problem of the Middle Ages, bedbugs are an insect that has been around for centuries, and carry the stigma of an unclean house. Since the bedbug infestation has shown up in Manhattan's Lincoln Center, in NYC fru-fru stores such as Bloomingdale's, and in Fifth Avenue apartments and dorm rooms of Ivy League Colleges and private schools, the stigma is particularly hard on the social upper crust to get over.

For some reason, there has been a huge surge in bedbug problems all across America over the last year or so, but it has been only the last few months that the outcry has been significant. Pest control places can't keep up. In a MyFox NY report we read that "Action Pest Control has been working night and day to rid clients of the pests. “The calls have just been out of control,” APC president John Russell said."

The infestation has been reported in Maine, where one case closed a school, and businesses report a surge in frantic requests just as in New York City.

In the American Midwest, the Resurgence of an age-old pest is driving Chicago buggy. In the south, in Georgia, "Bedbugs, on a comeback, pester locals." In Virginia, "hotel chains, private residences and at least one apartment building have had recent reports of the pests" and in Baltimore, MD  we are reminded us that bed bugs are "a pest once nearly eradicated in the United States. The recent comeback has left exterminators scratching their heads and Americans scratching everything else."

I'll be the first to say that I don't know what a bedbug outbreak means. At least from an end time standpoint, the bedbug issue isn't one that currently seems to be a precursor to Luke 21:11, "There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven. When we think of pestilences, or plagues, we normally think of the usual plagues: locusts, bubonic, or the flu. That's what pestilences are. Definitions on the web range from a "usually fatal epidemic disease, especially bubonic plague," "any epidemic disease with a high death rate." Bed bugs do not qualify as a pestilential plague, unless, of course, you are the person being bitten every night.

From a psychological point of view, the one being bitten experiences all sorts of reactions. We read of Dana Strong in Chicago, who "lies awake every night wondering if bedbugs are crawling up her bed and onto her sheets. She scratches imaginary bites and tosses and turns on her new mattress, which has a plastic cover to keep out the bloodsucking parasites. "It's horrible," Strong said. "I haven't slept in weeks." Or of Deirdre Strout in Portland Maine who "was about to inspect an apartment for bedbugs Monday afternoon when a woman who was passing by saw Strout's Atlantic Pest Solutions van, stopped the car and jumped out. The woman, bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, pleaded with Strout to help her get rid of her own bedbug infestation. It's like that all day long, Strout said. "Portland's got a heck of a pocket going,"...

People jumping out of their cars to accost Pest Control workers and begging for help to rid their mattress of the bloodsucking bite-monger? Pretty severe. I imagine a nation of zombie-people plagued with no sleep, irritable, creeped out by blood sucking bugs crawling over them as they lay down on infested mattresses. The psychological effects of being crawled over and feasted upon are insidious, according to this article, based on a study by the Mayo Clinic:

"Bedbug victims can find the mental effects of infestation more insidious and longer-lasting than the physical ones. Along with her three college roommates, Megan McNeil of North Cambridge, Mass., went through the same arduous process Alyssa did to rid their four-bedroom apartment of bedbugs last month. "Our exterminator was great. He definitely talked me down from the ledge," said McNeil, 23, who graduated from Emerson College, near Boston, last spring. "I think the worst damage bedbugs do is psychological. You will never look at hotel rooms or secondhand furniture the same way again."

But God is creative and His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. He is 19 million steps ahead of us and some how, some way, the bedbug infestation will combine with something else down the road. Or not, maybe it is just something small but significantly aggravating enough to remind us that we do not control nature, nor are we separate from it, that He is in control. One other definition of pestilences is, "a pernicious and malign influence that is hard to get rid of" and in that case, bed bugs definitely qualify!