I hate spiders. And I don’t mean that I simply don’t care for them. When I looked out my window and saw an enormous spider hanging in an equally enormous web, I learned just how difficult it can be to look past your fear. I screamed and ran away from the window.
But then I went back.
And when I stopped focusing on the spider long enough to really look at what was in front of me, I saw something else. I saw the web. It was incredible.
The threads stretched close to my window in an intricate pattern, each strand connected to another. I couldn’t understand how such a tiny creature could create something so elaborate and beautiful.
The spider still scared me. But the thing I feared had created something beautiful. And I almost missed it because I ran away.
Psalm 139:14 reminds me that God’s works are wonderful. And sometimes, even the creatures that frighten me can reveal something extraordinary about his creation.
How much beauty do we miss because we’re afraid?
I’ve learned a lot about fear throughout my life.
Some of those lessons came through travel. I have faced fears far from home because I wanted to experience what lay on the other side. I’ve climbed glaciers, entered caves, hiked through unfamiliar places, and found myself in situations where part of me wondered what in the world I was doing.
Yet some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen were waiting on the other side of fear.
God’s creation has a way of doing that to me.
Mountains. Oceans. Glaciers. Wildlife. Sunsets. And apparently, even spiderwebs. If I had let fear make every decision for me, there are places I never would have gone and things I never would have seen. But some fears have been much greater than anything I’ve faced while traveling.
Sometimes we have to look again.
The first time I saw the man who murdered my son, Luke, was in court. Tyrone wasn’t wearing handcuffs. For a moment, that frightened me. But fear wasn’t the only thing I saw when I looked at him.
I also saw a man sitting there with no one on his side of the courtroom. As I kept looking at him, God let me see something beyond the word murderer. I saw a human being.
A man God created. A man Jesus died for. A man I could love.
First John 4:18 tells us that perfect love drives out fear. That day, God’s love helped me see beyond my fear and recognize someone Jesus loved.
Over time, I would see much more of him—the good, the bad, the painful, the complicated. Loving someone doesn’t require pretending that everything about that person is beautiful. It doesn’t require denying what they’ve done.
Sometimes it means seeing all of someone and loving them anyway. That doesn’t make what Tyrone did beautiful. Nothing ever will. But God has created beauty in places where I never expected to find it.
Fear can make us run before we’ve really looked.
This morning, I ran from a spider. Then I went back to the window. Eventually, I became brave enough to remove the screen so I could photograph the magnificent web.
Think about that.
The woman who screamed and ran away was soon standing close enough to the spider to remove the screen and take its picture. I still didn’t want the spider anywhere near me. Let’s not get carried away.
But fear was no longer deciding what I could see. And perhaps that’s the lesson God had waiting outside my window.
Courage doesn’t always mean that we’re no longer afraid. Sometimes courage simply means going back to the window. We look again. And when we do, we may discover that something beautiful was there all along.
What might fear be keeping you from seeing? Look again.
