Hiding in Plain Sight

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I was working upstairs at my desk on Wednesday morning when LeAnn came up to report on our fall tomatoes. It had been a few days since she had inspected the crop, and when she came upstairs, she had news. Not only were the plants teeming with green tomatoes thanks to the cooler weather, but they had attracted their greatest nemesis. A few minutes later, I was in the garden with LeAnn hunting the evil that is the tomato hornworm.

Hornworms are fat green caterpillars, sometimes three inches long, with white stripes and a prominent horn on their tails. You know you have them when you see tomato plant branches that have been stripped clean of leaves or tomatoes with large holes. But finding them is difficult because they hide in plain sight, hanging upside down from still-healthy branches and masquerading as plump leaves. They’re easy to overlook, and you have to sort of adjust your focus in order to differentiate them from the green leaves. So, we bent down and peered into the tomato plants, which are four feet tall, and sure enough in the next few minutes we found seven hornworms.

Hornworms are both beautiful and grotesque. If they produced butterflies, we’d be all in for them. But they damage our tomato plants, so we deal with them harshly, LeAnn more so than me. She likes to crush them on the ground under her foot. I toss them over the fence onto the gravel driveway of the vacant house next door. My hope is a bird or some other natural predator will get them before they make the long journey back to our garden.

We usually see hornworms in the heat of summer, and it’s easy this time of year to be lulled into complacency by the cool damp weather. But now that we know they are there, we can’t turn our backs. We know from experience that a day or two without vigilance could result in the loss of the entire crop. So, we’ll be checking for hornworms every day until the tomatoes have turned pink and can be plucked to ripen in the safety of our kitchen window.

What’s true with tomatoes and hornworms is true with so many things in life; troubles — bad stuff — can be happening in plain sight. They can be masquerading as something good or even beneficial. If we don’t take the time to look around, the bad can get out of hand quickly. It can happen in our communities, neighborhoods, schools, churches, businesses and institutions. 

To ensure that bad stuff doesn’t overtake us, we have to be willing to leave our desks, focus our attention, and do the tedious work of looking under the green leaves. And if we find a problem, we need the courage to act. If not, we could lose a crop — whether that be fall tomatoes or the next generation of our own species.