Armistice Day & Spiders…

This is Armistice Day.

The day where we traditionally keep silent for 2 minutes at 11 a.m to commemorate the signing of a truce between the warring countries in Europe on November 11th 1918.  The cease fire occurred at 11am and silence fell on the battle fields.

And today, 101 years later it’s cold in Texas and I imagine those soldiers of old entrenched in fields, wet, muddy, scared and shivering on that first armistice morning in November.  I think of how they may have been feeling…these survivors…

Relieved that they would not be counted as one of the tens of thousands who fell on Flander’s fields or any other field for that matter, where war had raged for over four years.

Saved and going home.

Nervous about what going home may mean after the horrors they’ve seen.

Tired…

The name, Armistice Day, was changed in America in 1954 to Veterans Day to honor service members from all wars – not just those who served in WWI

And I am grateful that I have grown up in free countries, never known the threat of overhead bombs or sniper fire or invading tanks rolling into my street.

Today I slowly walk my property, wrapped up against the rapidly dropping temperatures,

It is misty and damp,

New grass is growing in the mild snap of the last couple of days,

and I find diamond frosted cobwebs,

CobWebs

that inspire me to stop and pray.

To stand in awe of this little brown spider who could apparently suspend herself in the middle of a field, anchoring her threads to the ground, running them to off shoots, hanging them from branches, to form a formidable trap for her prey.

A finely woven web; fragile and fleeting…like the lives of the service members we are honoring today.

Then I nearly run into one of the webs almost destroying it thoroughly,

I stop short and contemplate how to snap a good photo without ruining the tie lines,

I do my best to persuade it to reveal its splendour,

CobWeb3

its cascade of pearls are invisible from some angles yet in plain sight from others.

As I experiment with my camera words from the 2 Corinthians come to me,

“So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen; for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18)

So it is with these webs, the ones I run into thus ruining a work of art (to my eyes; a means of food to the spider’s) are temporary; with one careless move it’s gone.

The spider is resilient however and starts her spinning anew and sometimes, as in life, something happens to make the unseen come into better focus…

CobWeb2

Lord, I thank you for all the men and women who entered war without knowing its outcome.  I thank you for their bravery and selfless actions; I pray that their sacrifices will not ever be in vain and will bring about a change in our passing world and inspire us to look more closely for the unseen that is eternal; not to simply drift past life but to notice it and marvel.  Amen.

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