All The Help

While getting ready for work, I glanced down at the trash can in my bathroom. In stark relief against the white interior was a daddy longlegs (harvestman), busily scrambling in an attempt to escape from the situation he’d gotten himself into.

Watching the little thing, I thought back to the day when my wife rescued a chipmunk from a wading pool in our back yard. By the time she discovered it, the poor creature had almost exhausted itself swimming round and round, trying to find a way out of the circular and watery hell into which it had fallen. She lifted the chipmunk out and laid it on the grass, where it stretched out, gasping and gasping, until it found the strength to stagger away. I am convinced that, to this very day, local chipmunks tell the story of the Great Woman who rescued one of their number who was near death. I realized that if I had not noticed the daddy longlegs when I did, he might well have burst his tiny heart in a daylong effort to climb out of the slick-walled prison cell of the trash can.

I took the can out into the back yard and tipped it into the damp grass and watched the little one pick his way carefully through the green spears, off to a new adventure. As is my custom, I whispered, “You owe me” to the departing creature.

It’s been a long time since I believed that God answers every prayer and that He intervenes to help us when we’re stuck in traffic while enroute to an important meeting, or that He provides sunshine on the Saturday when we promised the grandchildren a trip to a park, or even when an entire church full of worshipers lift their hands to implore Him to stop a war or the spread of a disease or to spare the life of a loved member of the community. I have come to believe that He uses this earthly life as a classroom, and that we each face individual problems in the best way each of us can, learning or failing to learn, earning scars or knowledge or even that rare thing, wisdom. I believe He can and perhaps does intervene in extraordinary circumstances, but that these circumstances are not extraordinary in our eyes, but in His. And I find these beliefs to be of much deeper comfort than the idea that our Father is hovering over us, just waiting for us to squeal out in distress before He scoops us up and rescues us. Again and again. With nothing learned.

Almost everyone I know would say that the daddy longlegs has a tiny pinprick of a brain which is used only for the elemental purposes of movement, eating, and reproduction. I do not for a second believe this. I believe that the daddy longlegs was aware of his situation, that he felt fear and perhaps panic at it, and that he felt gratitude when the white giant picked him up and freed him into a cool morning’s emerald carpet. How could it not be so? This creature is a creation of the Ever-Living God, and what purpose would there be for some, some tool? It would be as if He creates human beings to be utilitarian objects to accomplish the goal of having all creation grovel before Him and declare His glory, while He Himself looks down His immaculate nose at these little things that are willing to live and die under His gaze for no other reason that what the Calvinists call “His unfathomable, eternal glory.” This makes no sense to me, and I reject it completely.

I believe the harvestman matters, just as I believe the leaves on the trees matter and the hummingbirds’ babies and the position of the rocks in and atop the soil. How can it be that I do not matter, or my family, or my friends, or those who come in and out of my notice each day?

My actions towards the daddy longlegs were sincere, and they serve to comfort me. If a deeply flawed man like myself can act show unfeigned kindness towards a creature as insubstantial as my hair, then it’s very easy for me to believe that a loving Father is kindly disposed towards me, even me.

Yes, this is deeply comforting to me.

~ S.K Orr