A golden leaf flutters down beside me onto the table and I pick it up to discover a pale yellow shell of a spider. Hollow and transparent. Beside it, a filmy drop of web still holding onto its leaf and the spider’s carcass from which it was spun.

I think about how everything is like something else. How my stories will outlast me. That our web is stronger than we are. So it is no wonder how long and arduous the task to write a story. And is it really ever done?

And how lovely to think that these stories we spin are the means to carry us through.

What if we got this life thing all wrong?

What if all this fighting, debating, hating and killing isn’t part of the deal? That all this ugliness is a part of human nature and not in the nature of God?

What if we’re confusing ourselves with God, applying our feelings with His feelings, our understanding with His meanings and getting it all sideways, backwards, twisted, wearing our entrails on the outside.

What if the most ugliest side of ourselves, the prideful, arrogant side of ourselves is the side that sides with God? With our Savior’s sword and our armor of righteousness. What then?

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