Grasshopper

I was weeding around our green beans and became transfixed by a grasshopper. His beautiful patterns, his huge quads (sadly my quad envy extends to insects), even his teeny, tiny leg hairs were amazing (I only need to shave from the knee down, too). I ran and got my camera and gave him a personal photo shoot until he escaped via a massive jump into the lawn. It reminded me of something I heard as a kid: Don't be like a grasshopper: great on distance but poor on direction.

It made me wonder,

Are grasshoppers really directionally challenged?

I read up on the species and discovered that I was misled as a child. (One of the many errors of my youth, right up there with eating canned fruit cocktail.) Grasshoppers not only jump 20 times their own length but can change their direction mid-flight, too. They aren't poor performers. They are gifted!

You're never too old to learn, even about grasshoppers, so I kept studying. I learned that a grasshopper can hear without ears. No lie. It has a disc-shaped ear drum inside its abdomen that senses vibration and sound and pretty much tells the bug everything it needs to know to stay alive. When the pulse is right the grasshopper catapults itself up, up, and away. Until the pulse is right, however, the grasshopper just sits and watches everything around it with its five eyes.

It doesn't stop with earless hearing. Get this next fact. Prepare yourself. It's going to be like entering The Matrix for some of you.

When the grasshopper feels the pulse and is ready to jump it relaxes its leg muscles. Yep. It relaxes, and by doing so the spring in his knee releases a bundle of stored energy that propels him skyward. It is counterintuitive to a stressball like myself to think that relaxing can allow progress. Work causes progress! Sweat causes progress! Pain causes progress! Relaxing causes recession, right?

Wrong.

And so the grasshopper schooled me with three life lessons as he nibbled away at my green bean leaves:

1. The pulse exists and cannot be heard with human ears. In my life the pulse is called the gift of the Holy Ghost, sometimes referred to as the Spirit, and it testifies of truth, makes fallacies falter, and warns of danger. The clutch inspiration that will guide me when and where to jump will be heard from within. I will hear it in my mind and in my heart and they will be the same sound. That is how God tells us what is right; when the promptings in the heart and the mind match. (D&C 8:2)

2. It's okay to sit still if you're not feeling the pulse to jump yet. Sometimes the heart and the mind don't match as much as we wish they would. Elder Robert D. Hales said

As we study our problems out in our minds, patience and pondering should have an important place in our decision-making process.

3. Relax if you want to get anywhere. I am a ball of tension. My traps feel like stone and my lower back is like steel. All I am going to gain from my current stress level is premature death or total hair loss before I'm 40. Maybe I can also squeeze in some adult acne and weight gain. Seriously, though, stress is bad news bears and not how the Lord wants me to feel. I personally think stress is a form of fear and fear is a weapon from the devil's arsenal. I should know by now that the cycle of life involves rotations into the unknown and so during the unknowns I need to be still, take in the world all around me, study and pray and think things out, wait for the inspiration that God has promised He will always send, relax, and then leap with faith [nothing wavering] once it's time to move.

I will know when it's time to jump.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. -James 1:5-6

Bruce R. McConkie referred to James 1:5 as "the most influential single verse of holy writ ever to flow from a prophetic pen."