I was in a mood today.

Nothing in particular was going on, but even after a perfect morning hike and a really good podcast, I just felt kind of wound up and irritable inside. So the only thing to do when this kind of mood strikes is to clean! It’s the kind of activity that benefits from a gritty edge, I suppose, because I can channel my inner bitch toward a messy countertop or dirty kitchen floor and no one gets harmed in the process.

Well… No humans, that is.

My house wasn’t all that messy when I started my cleaning attack, but because we live in the middle of an organic vineyard, there are always cobwebs to deal with each week. My gosh! Spiders are like around-the-clock weaving machines!! I seem to blast the same exact corners of my house with my “Earth-Friendly” essential oil-based all-purpose cleaner every single time I clean, but, in less than a week, these busy little suckers have rebuilt their webs in the same exact locations!

So today, because I was in “a mood,” I got toxic.

I used my Lysol Lemon-Scented Anti-Bacterial Surface Spray. 

BOOM!

Take that, spiders!

I unloaded trigger pull after trigger pull of that glorious fluid in every corner of my home where those sneaky spiders lurk and live. And with my vinyl gloves pulled up to my elbows, and a full roll of paper towels under my arm, I managed to wash nearly every painted wall in our home to see if I could convince these spiders to find a new place to spin their next web. No more “Earth-friendly” second chances here. GAME OVER!

Now, I will confess that I went a little nuts. And even right now, I can feel a tickle — or…maybe it’s a burn? — in my lungs from inhaling so much Lysol. The kind of trigger blasting I did probably warranted a mask of some sort… But it’s all good. I’ll recover! Plus, I rather like that burning feeling because it means I got things CLEAN!!

But fast-forward to a few hours after Hurricane Sonja made landfall.

My house was very still and quiet, and the bright lemon aroma of my cleaning storm had settled nicely over the place. I was just stretching out on my bed to reflect on the relief I always feel after I’ve done this kind of “corner cleaning” when I happened to look up at the low ceiling in my bedroom. And there, right over my head…was a giant Daddy Long-Leg Spider.  (Son-of-a -&$%#@!)

Quite frankly, when I saw the spider, my body was just too tired to jump up and attack it. So I decided to just remain still and watch the spider as it loomed overhead. As far as spiders go, Daddy-Long-Legs are supposedly harmless to people, and my dad always told me they were “good spiders” that like to eat other bugs. 

In my mind, my dad would know because he never fussed over any of the Daddy-Long-Legs that would creep out of our woodpile in the summertime. Of course, he may have just been telling me a story because when I was a little girl, I used to have the ability to let out a horrifically piercing scream you could hear for miles around when I was frightened — and I know my dad was always in favor of avoiding that noise.

But this spider overhead didn’t make me want to scream. 

And, in a way, I actually kind of admired it.

Every single week, that old spider keeps his head down, and he weaves another new web after the one he just spun got wiped out by yours truly. He doesn’t seem to need to curl up into a ball and cry, and he doesn’t get defensive and attack me for ruining his home. And if I’m being totally honest here, some of the spider webs I’ve destroyed are pretty elaborate and intricate, and even though I really don’t want them to be in my house, I can’t help but admire how spectacular they are…

I was already feeling like such a crabby jerk today, and cleaning is always the one thing I can count on to make me feel better. But today? I’m left with a weird sadness in the aftermath of it all because of that darn Daddy Long-Leg spider!

I realize I’m higher up on the food-chain than a spider, and to be very clear, I’ll never be awesome with the idea of sharing my home with bugs or any other critters. I prefer a world where they live outside and I live inside, and if we could all just make peace with that arrangement, I’d never blast another spider with lemon-scented Lysol again! 

But in the larger realm of my thoughts, I can’t help but consider the chain of events that reshape lives when people are only living in the mindset of what’s best for themselves. It’s so easy to get into that kind of mindset — at least it is for me. And I realize I’m comparing human lives to the life of a spider who was hanging over my head, but the point’s still valid.

I heard this super awesome statement about how Jesus sees the world. I’m going to be talking about this topic a bit in an upcoming episode of my podcast, NERD ALERT, so I won’t get into too much detail here. But the statement totally fits into the intersection of my thoughts about that spider, as well as how I sometimes forget to see others. The statement is super simple and it was elegantly coined by Father James Keenan. Here it is:

“Sin is a failure to bother to love.”

Talk about a BOOM…