Spiderwebs

            I saw a spiderweb this morning on my morning walk. The interesting thing about this web is it spanned from my trash can to a tree in my yard. It hit me how far the trash can was from the tree. There is about a 7-foot gap between them. I thought “how can a small little spider make a web that spans 7-feet?” It was an orb web, so it had a beautiful intricate detailed web in the middle of the 7-foot gap. I kept contemplating how did it do it? Did it just jump down or walk across? Is it able to jump across that far? How does a spider do it? I heard the Lord say “why don’t you research it” so I did. What I found is that spiders will spin loose thread and let it go, hoping the wind will carry it and connect it somewhere. There is no specific plan. The spider just let’s go of its web and trusts that the wind will carry it and connect it to where it’s supposed to be. Sometimes this doesn’t work, and the spider will eat its web and start over, but it never stops until it’s successful. Once the web is attached to another point, the spider will reinforce both sides crawling along the web and then it will crawl to the middle and drop down creating a third anchor before it begins its architectural build.

            As I researched this and thought about it, I realized this isn’t far from what God’s expectation is of us and are steps forward. We know that there is a vision and a plan. Some of us even have seen pieces and parts of what His plan is and all He expects for us to do is to launch that vision into the air and wait for it to catch.

            Three things about this captured my attention. First, the spider didn’t build its plan of where it was going to land it just set the vision out and the wind carried it across to where it needed to be. Second, the spider knows and had an inkling of an idea that this is where it was supposed to build and so it just kept launching until it finally hit a spot. Third, it knows it can’t build it by itself. It has to launch and wait for the wind to help carry it. It doesn’t give up and say, “well maybe I’m not supposed to build a web, maybe I’m just supposed to be a spider that lives in this one location.” It never thinks “I failed as a spider!” It never thinks “I’m not a good enough spider for the wind to help me.” It never thinks negative ideas about itself or its plan at all. It knows that it’s supposed to build a web it just doesn’t know where and it doesn’t know when, so the little spider trusts.