Webs of Faith

This week, as we were leaving the house I noticed that it is getting to be that time of year when all our friendly neighborhood spiders do their darndest to build their webs all over my front door. It drives me nuts. What normally ensues is a long battle between me, the broom, and the bevy of spiders that attempt to call my front door home. Each evening I finish with the door tidy and clean, but by morning there is a new, beautiful, but frustrating spider web. As much as I don't want these spiders to roost on my front door, they do create these webs that in the right light become beautiful works of art.

Have you ever noticed a spider web? Have you looked closely at their strong and fine detail as they grace our trees and doorways? These webs are held aloft by numerous points of connection, sometimes starting with just three points of connection, but often contain anywhere from twelve to thirty anchoring strands.

In the book Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From, Meredith Miller describes a healthy faith as looking like a spider web, with many different points of connection to God. She describes a healthy faith as one that is built on many different anchors, so that when new information is added or questioned, the whole of faith does not crumble. I like this metaphor because it gives our faith resiliency and room to grow and shift over time.

For the month of August in our worship, we are focusing on prayer and how God meets us in prayer. During our worship we are practicing different styles of prayer. Some of the styles of prayer will be entirely foreign or uncomfortable to you, but others might spark something new in your spiritual life. Each of us pray and connect to God in different ways. I hope from these practices and this series, you take away a form of prayer that opens a new anchor point in your own faith "spider web." And I hope that this focus on prayer helps us all draw nearer to God, as he draws nearer to us (James 4:8).

(Learn more about the book Woven here)