The Spider

The movie “Arachnophobia” released in theaters in July 1990 when I was 9 years old. To this day, I have never seen the movie because the commercials alone were enough to keep me up at night. That alone was enough to annoy my parents. As I now know, my sleep is greatly impacted by the sleep of my children. Unfortunately that was not the worst of the movie’s impact on my home.

One day after witnessing a spider crawl into my father’s flower bed, I decided to be the hero. I knew I wanted to remove the problem. The question was “How to remove the problem?” My weapon of choice was a baseball bat. Imagine my shock when my father was not pleased with my approach to the problem. In my thinking the destruction of his well groomed flower bed was a small price to pay to rid our home of this pesky problem. He was probably relieved I didn’t find the matches. After he brought me around to his way of thinking, my irrational fear was abundantly clear. My fear of one spider (among the thousands on our property) led to the unnecessary destruction of something beautiful.

There are many applications to this story (number one being do not hire me to be pest control). One of the others is the reality as a Christian, I’ve not always used the best approach when dealing with other’s struggles and sin. In my 20’s and even now, I’m like the 9 year old with the baseball bat smashing all the beauty while very rarely producing the evidence of actual repentance. At other times ignoring the issues all together. Both cause their share of damage.

One of the sports philosophies floating around these days is “Don’t waste a failure.” I have made many missteps in ministry and my prayer is that God won’t allow me to waste those but learn from them. The words I’ve been meditating and praying about in 2021 is “discernment” and “reasonableness”. I don’t want to walk around looking for “spiritual spiders” to trample down but when a strong word is needed may he make it so abundantly clear that it forces the necessary action. May his love be abundantly clear in all occasions.

Would you pray for discernment and reasonableness along with me for the next few minutes?

Travis