Reconciliation, better than Raid?

When I'm faced with spiders, I get a little freaked out by the creepy crawlers. Suddenly, I'm like a ninja, trying to find a way to destroy those arachnids before they destroy me, with moves I didn't even know I had in me. Of course, with that sudden surge of killer instinct, comes a great fear that they will, in fact, get me first. This is why I take time every week to clean out the cobwebs in my house. If there isn't a cobweb, there isn't a spider. Problem solved, right? Wrong!

God and I had a little bit of a cobwebbed conversation last week. I was lying in bed and saw a spider crawling on the ceiling. I couldn't sleep and my mind started to analyze the situation. Hadn't I just cleaned all of those cobwebs out of my house days ago? Where did this little guy come from? Then it hit me. Cleaning the cobwebs doesn't get rid of the spider it just makes it look like he no longer lives there.

Who knew that such strong conviction came in a such a small package with eight tiny little legs?

I had just spent time in prayer that day feeling that God was calling me to Reconciliation. I hadn't been in almost a month. As I stared at that little spider I realized that my sin was just like it and the cobwebs were just the visual evidence that it existed. Sometimes, we feel like if the mess the sin left is a little cleaned up on the outside, no one will every know, but the source still roams around, making new webs. Our sin stays in us, no matter how clean we look on the outside. God was calling me to kill the source of the cobweb: my sin. The only way I could do that was to meet him eyelash to eyelash, in the great Sacrament of Reconciliation and be filled with his grace.

Working in ministry is hard as it is, and cobwebs come in many shapes and forms from the various spiders we face. We get tangled up in those webs and it prevents us from doing God's work. He calls us not just to clean up the cobwebs, but to get rid of the source. In the world of sin, raid won't do...it's all about Reconciliation. He's waiting for you...