Spiders and Spirit

Our church service this morning was the most interesting thing we experienced this week. Roland’s sister Kammy Crowther and her husband Kevin have six of their seven children still living at home. Their 18-year-old son Grant has a bedroom that is a part of our little office building on the family property. Their 24-year-old son Brett has his own separate, self-contained living quarters with separate, outside entrance at one end of the residential building. Roland’s parents have a two bedroom apartment next to his. Then there’s a laundry room with separate, outside entrance. The rest of the building is the home of Kevin and Kammy and the four youngest children.

Our worship service is held every other Sunday morning in the living/dining area of Roland’s parents. Because the Crowther place is out of the way and the room is small, we haven’t generally felt ready to start inviting anyone else to attend, yet. Attendance is usually just the people from our two places, but that makes 20 people. Occasionally, though, one of us just won’t be able to resist inviting a friend to experience what we’re beginning to experience, or we’ll find ourselves talking about it to a friend in passing and they’ll invite themselves. This morning was one of those times. A friend of Brett’s attended with him.

The presence of that visitor probably made us all sit up a little more and, beyond just interacting warmly with him, we sought to genuinely experience worship in a way that he could be drawn into with us. The songs that Brett chose this week were great. Emmy’s worship leadership was a little more spirited than usual, and we were all drawn into a real encounter with a real God who is really making us who we were always born to be.

Then Roland began his message, and something brilliant, unscripted and more or less unscriptable happened. His text was the verse in I Peter that says “cast all your cares on Him, because He cares for you.” As he began to talk about anxiety, where it comes from, how we respond to it, and how it shapes us, a big spider appeared on the wall behind him near the ceiling.

A few of us wanted to take control of the situation and interrupt the sermon to dispatch the spider, but Roland asked us not to. He talked about how our instinct, instead of giving our anxieties to a caring God, is to try to take control of our circumstances, believing that by being controlling of the people and things around us we can avoid the things we fear. As the spider started walking across the ceiling toward the part of the room where Charlotte and Kaylah were sitting, they started scrambling from one end of the couch to the other, trying not to squeal. At that point Roland came to the next point in his message, where he talked about the tendency for our anxiety to be created not by what’s actually happening to us, but by what we’re afraid will happen to us. We could see that the spider was almost certainly not going to fall off the ceiling onto the girls, and nothing was, in fact, happening to them at all.

Bad things certainly can and do happen to us, but it’s not usually the actual bad things that separate us from God; it’s our anxiety about what we fear may happen in the future. So God tells us not to worry about tomorrow, but to seek first his kingdom, and to cast our anxiety upon him, because he cares for us.

Like the parables of farmer or fisherman, that image of the spider on the ceiling helps me remember something about the heart of God at work in my real, daily life.