Useless Things

Spiders creep me out. They also fascinate me. This is just one of contradictions that make up much of who I am. There are few things worse than blundering unseeing into a spider’s web stretched across a narrow path and then spending the next several minutes pulling sticky strands, barely visible, out of your hair and off your skin, all the while wondering if the spider who inhabited that particular web was somewhere on your body, crawling around and looking for a dark place to . . . to . . . oh, never mind! It’s too terrible to contemplate!

It would probably be poetic justice, though, considering how often I have disturbed spiders who were just minding their own business, sitting motionless in their web waiting for an insect to find its way into the web. I used to enjoy tossing dead leaves and other bits of vegetation in to the web to see if I could provoke the spider into coming to investigate. I never saw much emotion on the spider’s face when he (she?) discovered that what she (he?) thought was dinner was just so much useless rubbish. I would sometimes watch as it immediately set about cutting out the junk and then mending the web before returning to its vantage point to wait for another opportunity.

In one sense, I’m not dissimilar to the spider. I, too, have had my share of tantalizing temptations that I thought might really be something worthwhile, but in the end turned out to be useless junk. I, too, know the frustration of pursuing something I was sure would mean happiness only to discover once I caught up to it that it was little more than dead leaves and rubbish.

In another sense, however, I am not like the spider at all. When I discover what I thought was valuable is really only a collection of twigs, grass, and dead leaves, I don’t get busy and cut it out of my life. I leave it there. Sometimes I’ll come back to it to see if anything has changed, if somehow the vegetation has become something worthwhile through some unseen alchemy. To this point in my life, I can testify it never has.

How much better it would be to be like the spider and learn to cut the useless things out of our lives. A large part of the experience of the early church, as recorded in the first few chapters of Acts, was finding freedom from the possessions and earthly values that so easily consume us (See Acts 4:32-37). Early in Acts we see a theme developing: Christ, who was dead, is alive again, and everything has changed, including how those first believers viewed things like money and possessions.

What would it be like to be set free from our preoccupation with useless things? For that matter, how awesome would it be to be able to unfailing identify what matters and what doesn’t for those who claim the name of Christ. I certainly haven’t mastered that discipline, but it feels like the experiences of the fledgling church in the days immediately after Pentecost might be a good place to start learning. I can say I’m grateful for the object lesson observing spiders has taught me. But they still creep me out.