1st Sunday Devotional – Spiders and Webs

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift. ~Albert Einstein

I enjoy taking nature pictures and sharing them on social media. Something shared is always more fun and I’m like a little kid waving my picture around saying, “Look what I spotted.” When you give Mother Nature a chance, she can put plenty of things out there for you to spot and enjoy. And for all that I do spot and share, I’m sure there are a hundred more wonderful things that I miss out on because I’m not looking or I’m in too big a hurry.

But having my dog buddies gives me great motivation to be out there walking in the world of nature. In fact Frankie is determined to get his walks. If I’m slow to leave my computer to take that walk, he pushes his nose between my desk and my chair and then climbs halfway up into my lap. He is not lap dog size at 90 plus pounds, but he does block the computer screen really well. And so we go out into the natural world to see what we can see.  I tell myself that I can let new story ideas gather while I walk.

Sometimes I don’t even have to go far to discover a gift of nature. I spotted this little spider web on a flower on my deck while I was feeding Frankie and Marley. Frankie is just as insistent about meal times as walks. He needs no clock to know what time it is. But because I was there feeding them, I was given the gift of spotting this cute little spider web. When you really think about spider webs, you have to be amazed at the spider’s engineering ability. I have always wondered how the spider spun his webs. Did it have a little spool of silk strands to pull out for its web? It seems the Lord was much more high tech than that when He designed the spider. This is part of what I found about spiders and webs.

Spiders are tiny silk production factories. Inside their bodies, thread is stored as a highly concentrated liquid. A common garden spider can produce as many a seven types of silk, each made up of a different sequence of proteins. Each type of thread serves a distinct purpose: one, for example, makes the web stretchy to better absorb the impact of insects smacking into it; another makes the thread less brittle. Still other proteins protect the threads from bacteria and fungi, and keep it moist.

So how amazing is that? I didn’t see the spider that made this web and by afternoon, the web was merely a few loose strands of silk. The spider was off to find a better bug catching place to build a new web, I suppose. But I was gifted with the sight of this one perfect web.

“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” ~Aristotle

The Lord has made every creature unique and special in our world.