Related articles - Living Well, Living Right
A few weeks ago, on one of our beautiful summer days, I sat and observed a spider on our front porch for about an hour. He taught me a lot about life. Just watching the miracle of his making a spider web would have justified my time, but there was even more to be learned about, than God’s creative genius. After my friend, the spider completed his magnificent web he waited for his dinner to arrive.
After a long ten minute wait, without him moving a muscle, he and I both saw his meal fly be. As soon as the fly’s little feet touched the spider web, he began to struggle for his freedom, but the more that he struggled, the more parts of his body became stuck. After about a minute, the spider happily walked over to the mosquito and wrapped him like a taco in his web. Finally, the mosquito breathed his last and the spider enjoyed his meal.
The lessons were not lost on me. You and I are much like that mosquito, flying here and there, doing the things we need to do to survive, but often unaware of the dangers that lurk nearby, to lure us off the right course, and ultimately to destroy us.
I said a couple of weeks ago, regarding the fourth life-pillar of righteousness, that the only way to end up at the right destination, is to choose the right path. Solomon said it like this, “In the way of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death.” Every day we make a thousand choices about which way to go, what to say, and what to think. The right way is the way of life, and the wrong way leads to death.
That’s why in my last article I emphasized that the only safe way to live is in submission to the Lord, our shepherd, who knows the right and safe way to go.
Recently, I was reading the book, “Clicking” by futurist Faith Popcorn. She said that the 1990’s and the new millennium, offer a “salad bar” selection of religions. Having come out of the rigid fifties and sixties, where tradition and religious forms kept us in a moral straight jacket, and then into the seventies and eighties where we declared that God was dead, we are now looking again for the anchor and stability that Christianity offered our parents. But we want it our way.
We take a little of this philosophy, a little of that tradition and a little bit of the faith of our fathers, and we have a “salad bar” religion. But the fact remains that there is a right way, and there is a wrong way. The right way is the same as it always was, “trust in the Lord with all your heart, do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will direct your paths.”
