Enrique, Who Lives In My Bathroom

Through the course of my childhood and well into my adult life, I have occasionally made friends with bugs. It usually happens when I give them a name, with ladybugs and spiders being the most common. I had a brief relationship with a cricket one year during college, but his legs fell off after only a few hours and the next day I had the unseemly task of vacuuming him up.

Spiders, though, have longevity, so they make great household companions. There is currently a Daddy Long Legs (should that be capitalized? It looks a bit odd capitalized.) who inhabits the upper left corner of the front of my shower. He always stayed in his corner and never bothered me, and since he won't bite me and is non venomous (unlike the black widows I have in the past killed in the garage), and since he will help take care of the annoying little fruit flies and gnats that show up, I have left him alone. He stays in his corner, and I don't interfere with him, and all is well. I feel like we were both happy with this arrangement. I dubbed him Enrique.

And then, about a week ago, the most peculiar thing started happening. Whenever I would get in the shower, rather than staying in his little web out of harm's way, he would meander down to see what was happening. Our shower is small. This was not exactly a pleasant situation.

The first time he did it, I was sure it would be the last. He made it halfway down the shower wall while I watched, stupefied, as his skinny legs would get stuck in the droplets of water. Have you ever looked at a Daddy Long Legs' legs? I mean, really studied them? They are impossibly thin. It's astonishing to me that there is even muscle in them. He would take a step, get stuck in a droplet of water which would immediately suction his leg to the wall, wiggle himself free, take a step, lose his grip, start over again.

We've done this every day for a week now. Shower comes on. Enrique runs from the top corner, heads down the wall. Gets stuck. Slips and slides, loses his grip and falls 6 inches, causing me to start violently and splash water all over in my panic. (I'm okay with him in my shower, but I don't want him IN my SHOWER.) At the last second he manages to grab onto the wall again with one scrawny leg, gets his footing, starts back up. Caught in a drop of water. Suction. Fall. Again, and again, and for literally ten minutes, he will do this, and not get anywhere. He's still in the middle of the shower wall.

It is to the point now that, when I see him coming, I groan aloud and say, "Really, Enrique? You haven't figured this out yet?" And I watch in exasperation and make sarcastic comments to him.

But you know what? After a while, compassion takes over. Yeah, I know he's a dumb spider, and I know you're probably thinking you'd just squash him and get it over with. But that's not me. Eventually I feel sorry for him, struggling and stuck. So I take my little rectangle pumice stone, and I hold it up underneath him so he can get a grip on it. Then I lift him up to the top, where the wall is dry, and he wanders back to his home.

I shouldn't make it sound that easy, actually. It's sometimes a but of a fiasco. The pumice thing is REALLY easy for him to grip, wet or not, and usually as soon as he's on it, he starts booking it across the stone, which puts him heading toward my hand. As I mentioned earlier, I don't actually want him touching me, so I sometimes panic and drop the stone or Enrique or cause some other sort of mild destruction. The other day he waked right off the side and fell in the water and it took all my willpower not to start thrashing around like the little elephant in Tarzan when he thinks he got bit by a piranha. When I fished him out I was sure he was dead, but after a few moments he forced his way to his feet and climbed wearily up the wall. (Yes, I said "wearily." If a spider can be described as "trudging," that's exactly what he was doing.) He has not come out of these escapades undamaged. He only has six legs left. I don't know how many legs a spider can lose and still function, but apparently at least two are superfluous.

Anyway. A week now this has been going on, and through the process, God used this weird life experience to teach me a lesson - and yes, I am the spider, and I will assert that so are you.

Really, we all climb down that blasted wall, don't we? There are areas of our lives that are a mess, and we keep going back to them. For some people it may be leaning on anger or unforgiveness as a crutch; for others it may be a physical addiction; some people have emotional issues or fear or arrogance or really nasty, bad habits that are not representative of a follower of Christ. For Pharaoh, it was one more night with the frogs. (Remember that story? Frogs covered Egypt, and Moses told Pharaoh to tell him when to pray for the frogs to be taken away, and Pharaoh said, "Tomorrow." REALLY, Pharaoh? Tomorrow? How about NOW?!? For whatever reason, he wanted to spend one more night with the frogs.)

And Enrique climbs down the wall, again and again. It does him no good. It only hurts him. And even though I have things in my life that do me no good, I go down the wall. I don't get rid of it. I don't walk away from it, and who know...I may be in the process of losing a metaphorical leg or two. And God watches us, his children whom he loves beyond measure, struggling with our skinny little legs stuck in a droplet of water, helpless in a situation that we had no business getting into to begin with...and he wants to help. He never turns his back, never gives up on us and always, always wants to bring us back into the safety of his rest.

The problem with analogies is that they eventually break down. There comes a point where you just can't make any more similarities and you have to take something for what it is. God's compassion is quicker than my own, he doesn't panic if we get too close and, in general, he doesn't accidentally kill us when he's trying to help us up.

But you get my point, right? God's goodness is unending. It's something that I've needed recently, because I feel like I'm caught in a perpetual loop of anxiety and negativity lately. I don't like it, I'm aware of it, I see it coming, and yet I never seem to avoid it. And God has used this spider, with only seventy-five percent of its legs, to help me understand how good and faithful he is. The reassurance comes in an odd package, I know, but I'll take it.