We took a hike a couple of weeks ago in the rainforest. Now St. Croix’s rain forest is relatively small, but it offers pretty much everything you’d expect in a rain forest (except large, colorful birds and monkeys. I think it needs flamboyant parrots and macaws and howling, swinging monkeys, but alas, there are neither here.) Anyway, we hiked up a watercourse – which is called a gut here. I took my camera and had a field day snapping the interesting and the beautiful.
There is a downside to such an outing, I truly hate walking through a spider web. I have instant fear of being covered with spiders when I do. Yuck. Remember the scene in Madagascar when the lion walks through the web? That’s me – dancing and brushing myself off. The end of that scene when the lion realizes he has a huge arachnid on his back haunts me, and after I walk through a web, I thoroughly expect for some multi-eyed and eight-legged hitchhiker to greet me with a resounding “Well Hidee do!”
*shivering* Anyway. Thankfully I did not walk through one particularly wide web, inhabited by a seriously large but beautiful spider. Instead, I was able to watch and snap some pictures of her. She was, however, unimpressed with me and as I watched her, another, smaller spider joined her in the net. Before I realized exactly what she was doing, she wrapped him up in webbing, presumably to save for a snack later. *again shivering*.
I’ve thought a lot about that spider. I’ve considered how happy I am that I didn’t walk through her web. I’ve also thought about how beautiful and intricate the markings on her body were. I’ve considered her actions of eating her guests. Mostly, I’ve thought about how the details and intricacies of spiders speak so much about the Creator of those spiders. I can’t explain a whole lot about our world, but watching a spider dance on her web, or encountering dolphins like I did last week, or watching the light dazzle through the clouds as it sets – all these wonders of nature reinforce to me that we are here by Design not accident. And that reassurance comforts and encourages me. God is good all the time.
