I have developed a deep respect for spiders over the last few weeks and begun to notice there are some profound and significant things about them from which I can learn and take note.

I sat down here to reflect over this past week, it has been so crazy and yet so non-descript I suppose. Work at the hospital has met me with so many challenges and challenged my very security as well as addressing the question of how to live as broken as the Lord is refining me, in a place where patients you love are ill, in crisis and dying or dead. Its learning how to love colleagues who offend and upset, and how to not live under fleshly condemnation that would have me feel incapable altogether to do the job God told me to do. What a ministry school, I mean really, I know that is why God has me here, to learn how to love, how to be and how to live as His handmaiden in the darkness.

I sat down to reflect upon the lessons He has taught me this week and the things He has done that has not only rocked my world beyond all belief, but has broken me and silenced me as I wait to figure out what is going on and take my hands off it entirely.

However, as I sat here I watched a spider, suspended in mid air and then gently lowering itself down to the platform below before rising once more and repeating the cycle. I could not figure out what it was doing until I realized that it was adding guy ropes to its web. Suddenly something made sense and im not even sure quite what. But as I watched the web be buffeted around in the wind, the faithful, measured, patient mending of it by the spider and the guy ropes that were so very tiny that held it into place, I found a kinship with the little creation.

There are times when I do not understand what is going on. Nothing dramatic has occurred, no great tragedy or anything, merely small whisperings and unexpected arrivals of God in the everyday. Once He begins to hijack your time and everything you have and are, you no longer have control and sometimes, I feel like all I can do as the wind is picking up, is to drop down once more, return to the beginning, return to my first love…and attach another guy rope.

They may be thin and feeble and insufficient, but as I return once more to the author, to my foundation, I can rest assured that in everything I walk, everything He is asking me to do or continue, I know that it is already inherently built within me. Like the miraculous spider who knows from the moment of birth, how to create a web, how to weave, drop, lift, measure and most importantly, stand and wait, so I believe that God has given us instincts and an inherent ability to find Him, to walk His way and to know how to wait on Him. Therefore I return to my first love, I drop another guy rope, and then I wait, knowing that if there is any tear in the web that is my walk, He will show me and together we will know how to fix it, and that the enlargement of my territory, the moment when I should move on, the place where I should go and the ability to begin again, will all come as naturally to me…

…as it does to the humble spider.

This is my cry
My one desire
Is to be where you are Lord,
Now and forever
Its more than a song
Its my one desire
To be with you
Is to be with you
Jesus

And the one thing
The one thing that I ask
Is to be with you

- Hillsongs