The God of small spiders


Whilst she was in the Faith House garden, Gillian sat and watched a spider at work in his web. The spider had built a web which stretched diagonally all the way from the side of the house to a bush, six foot from the wall. The web was a single strand of cobweb and in the middle of the strand, the spider was busy building his net of cobwebs into a structure. Gillian commented: ‘How can people say there is no God?’

Whether you like spiders or not, you have to admire their ingenuity. Wherever you walk in Autumn, you see cobwebs spanning the most improbable places – I have a spider that daily builds a cobweb over the wing mirror of my car, only for the web to be blown away every day on the way to Little Ewell.

The spider’s willingness to exploit every opportunity can be good metaphor for us.

Spiders have faith and persevere: Cobwebs gather every week in the corner of your house, only to be swept away every week in your weekly clean, yet the spider returns and builds again the following week. I have never met a spider that has complained to me that the bush and the wall are too far apart. Every new web does not promise a juicy spider, but no spider ever caught his lunch without spinning a web. In the letter of Timothy (4: 5-7), Timothy writes: ‘But you…endure hardship,….fulfil your ministry. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith’.

More than this though, the spider describes a way to approach life and understand God within it. God provides the brick wall, the bush, the wing mirror, the structures that surround us. Our job, and that of the spider’s, is simply to use each one of these gifts as well as we are able, to build a life for us and our community. And in doing so, others will draw inspiration, find faith and perhaps exclaim:

‘How can people say there is no God?’

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