Spiders spinning stories

One would have thought I was roaming the forests of Mirkwood¹ this morning. Here, on the day of the Summer Solstice, the overcast really was that dark.² My normal routine at this time of year is to jog through the woods in the cool of the early morning. Usually dappled sunlight refracts through bejeweled dewdrops, and it takes only a tiny bit of imagination to pretend that I am running through a fairyland.

But today…   🕸 Spider webs and darkness lie afoul!


I had been doing pretty well avoiding the spider webs this year. The dark clouds probably contributed to the invisibility of the one that snared me. This one must have been huge because it covered me head to hip and wrapped around my back as I ran through the place it had been spun. It felt like I was coated with bandage residue.


And how does this misadventure relate to the Bootcamp Planet?

Certainly as a metaphor. Webs of one sort or another are always strung across the path of life. But today, particularly being the solstice when daylight begins growing shorter… did it portend evil?  
(cue dramatic music in a minor chord)

I do believe in the supernatural. God is supernatural.  But I am not so much of a mystic that I would consider a spider web on my jogging path as a bad omen or evil sign.

Unfortunately, the church that I grew up in had almost completely pushed out the supernatural. They tried to explain God by using science, and that does not work very well. God is the author of true science, and He has declared that knowledge obtained by that means is incomplete. Unsurprisingly, while my family attended that church, I never saw a physically supernatural miracle, and I saw very little of God's Power and Glory.  That is because…
Well, there are two other elements that must be understood first, just as long division cannot be explained without first covering multiplication and subtraction!


First
First one must understand that Jesus Himself said that there are some things we cannot know by human knowledge alone. Jesus had just asked Peter who He (Jesus) was and Peter correctly answered that Jesus was the Messiah (the Christ), the Son of the living God. Jesus' response: Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah (Peter), for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. Matthew 16:17. This was immediately followed, as we read in Matthew 16:18 by the statement: I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

The "rock" that Jesus was standing on at that point was physically the base of Mt Hermon, next to a grotto of Pan. Pan is the Greco-Roman god of the wild. He plays a flute. Pan has the horns, hindquarters, and hooves of a goat— in other words, Jesus' true identity was revealed supernaturally in the very spot that the Romans were physically worshiping the demon Pan. The fact that Jesus immediately referenced the Gates of Hades ought to draw attention to the multi-level meaning.  Jesus is speaking of both natural and supernatural events simultaneously. This happens often in scripture.

Secondly
God's 'children' are human beings. We do operate in the natural world. We were born here. Yet our 'Father' is supernatural and communicates through spirit, not through physical (flesh and blood) methods. For the longest time, no one could explain to my why Jesus had to die—and to be resurrected, in order for humans to be "saved."  I now realize that part of the difficulty was that it was a multilevel or multidimensional problem, needing a multilevel or multidimensional answer. 


One level is spirit — the part of us that can connect to dimensions outside Earth's space/mass/time.  It is our ageless, non-physical part.  It is bound to the soul. If the Holy Spirit does not reveal the spiritual part to you, you are pretty much sunk. The good news is that he has promised to be found when sought for, to answer when asked, and to save when the heart confesses Jesus as Lord. We must actively participate in the communication; sitting around waiting to get zapped from on high won't get you connected.

Another level is physical — the part of us that connects to the tangible world through sight, sound, touch, taste and aroma. It is the housing for our personality and our mortality.  For whatever reason, this verse from Hebrews 2:17 never made it into the formal instruction from church. I eventually read it on my own: Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. And it wasn't the word "propitiation" that snagged me either. True, it is not used in everyday English, but it is simply an action meant to regain someone's favor and make things right again.  In hindsight, it seems like somebody should have been able to explain that a human sin needed a human to fix it, but I don't remember anyone ever making it that simple for me. 

And then there is the soul level — the part of us that can reason, detect, produce, and respond to emotion, make choices, have a conscience, and is the essence of our personality.  This is where the real work of our purpose on this planet takes place.  We have to connect our physical with God's spiritual at the soul level.

Successfully connecting involves both work and wisdom.  We have to be in touch with and develop a sense of the supernatural if we are ever to hear God clearly and consistently. That instruction was missing in my childhood church, but it is critically important for life on out Bootcamp Planet.

I never saw a physical miracle at my childhood church and I saw very little of God's Power and Glory there because they were either closed to or disconnected from the the supernatural side of God. We will miss out on so much if we presumptuously put boundaries on God and refuse to acknowledge the supernatural. 

So maybe, supernaturally, that spider web was not there by random chance. My childhood church would have called it random chance, but perhaps the spider was directed to spin her web in that physical place and time so that I would have a story to tell about the supernatural. I would not put it past God to have a spider on his side when he has a message to get out. We may struggle to connect with His spiritual reality, but He has no problem connecting with our physical one.



¹ Mirkwood is the Anglicized form of the Norse name Myrkviðr. JRR Tolkein chose it as the name for a dark boundary forest in his fictional writings set in Middle Earth. For the real-life Norsemen, Myrkviðr was the densely forested boundary between the Goths and the Huns. Mirkwood is prominently featured in The Hobbit where the dwarves are captured and bound in giant spider webs for use as future spider dinners.

 ² My camera always sees more light than the human eye, and if I try to edit it darker, the brightness and the contrast start arguing and it all looks fake. The woods was much darker than it appears in the photo.