Big black carpenter ants were on the walls in one corner of our dining room. Upon examination of the scene, a contractor friend told us he’d rather have termites than carpenter ants. This was scary, as we had come to value his opinion on construction matters.

I quickly called an exterminator, who arrived at our house and sprayed the corner of the attic where he had found the ants’ nest. For a while after that we saw fewer ants. But quite a few were left, so we called for a second spraying, which was done. As before, the number of ants immediately decreased, but soon it was increasing again. I called a third time, and the exterminator kindly told us that because of how entrenched the ants were in our attic, he could not get rid of them permanently. 

Wow! That was frightening to hear. What would become of our home?

But then I did what I should have done in the beginning—pray! As I opened my thought to God, I felt led to look up references to ants in the Bible. There are two: Proverbs 6:6 and 30:25. Nothing bad is said about ants; rather, they are described as wise and industrious. I also read the first chapter of Genesis, which says that God made everything and saw that it was “very good” (verse 31). This study helped me understand that God did not make anything harmful or destructive. 

The ants continued to appear on our dining room walls, so I continued to pray with these spiritual truths. One morning, as I was walking around the house reading the weekly Bible Lesson in the Full-Text Edition of the Christian Science Quarterly, I walked into the dining room, looked up, and saw ants climbing on the walls in the corner below their attic nest. Then I went back to the Lesson, and this statement from the Responsive Reading stood out to me: “I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38, 39).

At that moment I saw that nothing, including ants, could separate us from the love of God. It was as if a light had come on in my thought. Then I happened to look up again, and there were no ants to be seen. Right where there had been about twenty big black carpenter ants crawling on the walls, suddenly there were none. And we never saw any more ants in our home. 

In addition, I found I was better able to appreciate some creatures I had previously thought of as undesirable. I could admire the agility with which a snake conveyed itself across the lawn, or how symmetrically a spider spun its web.

Years later when it came time for us to sell our house, no home inspector noted any damage resulting from ants in the attic or any other part of the house. Truly, no creature had separated us from the love of God.