Spiked Flies

From the book, Windows On God’s World, by James A Tucker comes a story about a young scientist who won first prize in a high school science fair with an exhibit of her experiments with spiders and their webs. Her project involved a comparison between the webs spun by normal spiders and those spun by spiders under the influence of alcohol.

At first the girl collected a number of common house spiders for her experiment, but she had difficulty with them. When she injected the wine directly into them, they all dropped dead. Then she adopted the plan of feeding wine-injected flies to the spiders. The spiders did not die, but they did not spin webs, either. Somewhat discouraged, she took her problem to her teacher and learned that house spiders are not much for making webs. They simply make strands of silk that are strung in all directions with no particular pattern. She was advised to find some of the common garden species, long know for their talent for constructing beautiful orb webs.

Thus encouraged, the girl again got busy with her project. She found a number of garden spiders and fed them wine-injected flies. This time her efforts were rewarded. The drunken spiders began to spin all sorts of wild and unorganized webs that did not at all resemble the intricate and near-perfect designs they were able to spin under normal circumstances.

After eating the spiked flies, a spider would begin spinning frantically, totally without method or reason. And the tipsy creature would keep on spinning without stopping until it passed out cold. I wonder if that drunk spider was near the computer – hummm – maybe that’s how we got web pages? Groan! Just checking to see if you’re still with me!

A pearl to string: In all good consciousness one should not plan to eat spiked flies. The Bible tells us that God has a superb design for our lives. We have something beautiful to do for our Lord and we don’t want to get drunk on the ways of the world and go web crazy! “He leans on his web, but it gives way; he clings to it, but it does not hold”. (Job 8:15) See! It’s all in the Good Book. Every direction we need to follow Jesus. It’s all written down for us. How cool is that. So dear hearts “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ”. (Colossians 2:8) And “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will”. (Romans 12:2)

Delighting in His Word,
Lyndi