Nancy Ortberg tells the story about how their family dog, a golden retriever named Baxter, would get covered with ticks. So after doing some research about ticks, here's what she discovered:

They actually call ticks "the overeaters of the insect world." For those of you who are really technical in your biology … they're of the arachnoid family; they're not really insects.

[Ticks] have the disease of "more," and when they latch on they can't stop. Before a tick lands on its host it's not very attractive, but it is very flat. Then a tick drops onto (because they do not have the capacity to jump) from a bush or a thicket onto their host, looking for a warm-blooded creature. Once they engorge themselves with the host's blood, they balloon up to 7-10 times their normal size. They're utterly transformed.

The fascinating thing is once a tick has bloated up it automatically drops off the host and then can't move. All of the energy in its body is directed to digesting what it's just eaten. For the next few hours it is at the mercy of predators because it has eaten so much that it can't move.

Nancy Ortberg claims there can be a parallel with our spiritual lives. She says, "I have to admit that when I consider what I learned about ticks, there's a little bit of a tick in me. I can be sometimes a picture of excess, not knowing when to say 'enough,' not knowing when to stop, and always wanting more."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Contentment vs. Discontentment—When do we ever have enough? (2) Spiritual growth—Sometimes we approach our life with Christ like the tick—ther's all intake but not opportunity to pour out to others.