Faith, Folklore, and Friends

There is not a spider hanging on the king's wall that does  not have its errand; there is not a nettle that  grows in the  corner of the churchyard that does not have its purpose;  there is not a single insect  fluttering in the breeze that does not accomplish some divine decree; and I will never have it  that God  created any man, especially any Christian man, to  be a blank and to be a nothing. He made you for an  end.  Find out what that end is. Find out your niche and fill it. If it is  ever so little, if it is only to be a  chopper of wood and a  drawer of water, do something in this great battle for God  and  truth. - Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things. We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation.   While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water. ― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

My hub hates spiders. He has never made it all the way through the movie "Arachnophobia". Occasionally, I will have to get a spider out of the bathtub, temporarily reversing our roles. Spiders really don't scare me, although I was bitten by a brown recluse many years ago. They are just spiders. They have their place in the world, just like we do. From National Geographic News , Christine Dell'Amore, October 21, 2009: Part of a well-known group of golden orb-weaver spiders—which can spin webs up to three feet (one meter) wide—Nephila komaci was first identified in a South African museum collection in 2000. N. komaci is likely rare within its small habitats in South Africa and Madagascar, researchers say, and females are much less common than males. Much is still unknown about the species' biology, but study co-author and spider expert Jonathan Coddington suspects the female evolved her extreme size to thwart smaller predators and to be able to lay more eggs. In add...