OK, any resemblance to a fisherman’s tale is coincidental.
Despite waning enthusiasm for the task, yesterday I tackled
the spring cleaning in the living room/kitchen, sucking up dust bunnies lurking
in corners and wiping down coal-black picture rails, all with one eye on the
incredible tennis coming from Wimbledon. A spoon full of sugar...
Late on in the day, as I neared the end of the job, I
disturbed a spider that was, as my Dad would have said, ‘as big as a Buick’ (a
Buick being an American luxury car). No kidding. The span of my hand, or nearly
... Don was outside; the hoover was out of reach; and this dinosaur spider was
running amok on a kitchen counter. He disappeared under a pewter bread dish, perilously
close to the box of brownies. Emergency. I gingerly turned over the bread dish,
and there he clung, catching his breath before darting manically – perhaps up
my arm. Moving smoothly and swiftly with the odd breathy imprecation, I
transferred him out the backdoor and into the bushes. Whew.
No. I don’t have a picture of this Machiavellian devil but
believe me, he was huge. So what did Jesus have to say about spiders? Hmm. Not
a lot, it turns out.
Onto another creepy crawly – three weeks ago I wrote about
unwittingly sharing my blood supply with a couple of ticks. Ugly, creepy, but I
managed to remove them myself. Except that now, one of them is red and I am on
antibiotics. Tiny but deadly, as opposed to huge but (possibly) harmless.
Turns out Jesus didn’t say much about ticks either.
I’m happy to love creation, but I want it to remain outside
where it was created to live, sucking on the blood of deer or cats but not
mine. I love God, but he does make it challenging to love all his creatures...
