Spiders and their webs

Two weeks ago, I came into my office one morning and a large spider web had appeared over night between the legs of a table I have sitting in front of my window.

I wiped the web away and proceeded with my day.

The next morning, I came into my office, and another large web spanned the same two legs of that table.

I swiped it away with a cloth and proceeded with my day.

As I sat at my desk, though, looking at the clean legs of that table, I realized the mesh was going to appear again the next day if I didn’t remove the critter that weaved the construct in the first place. Webs don’t appear by themselves! I reminded myself.

So, I hunted down the eight-legged creature responsible for the web and shooed him out the door.

Ta da!

There have been no more webs since then.

Then I pondered the relevance of this lesson to spiritual healing.

As a metaphor, I decided the web was like symptoms on the body, and the spider was the mortal mind belief producing the symptoms on the body. If one focuses only on removing symptoms, either with a medicine, a surgery, or through human will power, there may be temporary relief, but the problem recurs until the underlying error in thought has been destroyed.

I remember a time when our daughter was around 4 years old. One day, she was complaining about pain in her legs. I prayed with her. No relief. When I tucked her in at night, we talked some more about healing the pain, and she mentioned something about riding a horse recently. I quizzed her some more, and she said that her legs hurt because they got stretched too wide straddling the horse she had ridden.

I suddenly saw that in her mind, her legs hurt because of straddling the horse, and until we removed that belief from her thought, she was holding a justification for suffering in her mind, and the pain would continue until that belief was removed.

So I targeted the “spider”—or belief—at work behind the scenes causing the outward suffering. We talked about how riding that horse was fun and no harm could come from it, even if our legs got stretched different than normal. She happily agreed, quickly fell asleep, and that was the end of the pain.

So, the moral of the story is, if you don’t want anymore webs of error woven in a particular area of your life, eliminate the critter behind the scenes weaving the maze in the first place. It’s a lot easier that way because you don’t have to keep repeating your work.