“Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience enable us to follow Jesus’ example.” —Mary Baker Eddy
One of the garden’s best friends is one of the most ferocious predators on Earth: the ladybug. A single ladybug can eat 100 aphids a day, day after day, month after month. It can eat forty in a row, in an hour.
More than four thousand species of ladybug creep on our globe, but the most familiar is the glossy, red-backed, black-spotted convergent ladybug. Almost every species eats a different diet. Some only eat aphids or certain types of aphids; some stick to mealybugs, whiteflies, or scale—all garden pests.
Naturally, the ladybug’s tremendous ability to keep down pests has created an industry that gathers and sells ladybugs, but the industry has had only modest success. The ladybugs can fly, after all, and don’t tend to stay in the garden of the one who bought them. Nonetheless, they undoubtedly help someone else. After winging straight up in the air, they drift on prevailing winds until they land in another garden, which also probably needs a little help with pest control.
I think of ladybugs like prayers, winging through the air. Recently two major studies have found that prayer cures or alleviates illness, even if the people prayed for don’t know about it, or if the people doing the praying are not personally acquainted with the subjects of their prayers. The studies suggest to me that a prayer might be winging past me at this moment. Maybe it’s headed past me, but who knows? Maybe it will light in my garden.
