Recently, it was my privilege to sit in a Sunday School class under the teaching of a saintly lady. She told how, in the week just passed, she had taken great efforts to clean her house thoroughly. She had mopped, run the sweeper, dusted, washed the curtains. She thought she had not left one inch of that house untouched and finally, tired and weary from her long hours of labor, she stretched out on her bed to rest awhile.
It was then that her eyes were turned upward and there in the ceiling corners she caught a glimpse of several little cobwebs. Just then the Lord seemed to speak to her and said: "Yes, you have been very careful to clean and care for the things on the floor level. However, while you have been so busy giving attention to things on that plane, you have forgotten to look after the loftier matters and the spiders have built their webs in the area you forgot to give attention to."
She said that she took this all as a lesson from the Lord that needed to be applied to our everyday living. And then she asked, "Do we not get so busy in the daily hustle and bustle of life, trying to make a living, trying to keep things in order on the earthly level until we neglect to give proper attention to things higher? We often do a pretty good job keeping our spiritual houses in order to a certain degree. We offer thanks at the table and may even give a little time for the reading of a few Scriptures and a few moments of private devotion. We manage to get to church when services are on and we are faithful in the giving of our means to support the work. However, often this becomes a routine thing and in the execution of those duties we fail to come apart from it all, simply stretch ourselves out before the Lord and examine the tiny corners of the loftier heights to see if there are cobwebs gathering there."
As she told this beautiful story, so applicable to most of us, my mind went back to something I heard an old soldier of the cross tell one time. He said that most of us are so earthly minded until we are no heavenly good. He said that we get so busy digging for dollars in the dirt until we forget to look up to see where our blessings are coming from and finally God has to lay us flat on our aching backs until there is only one way we can look -up! He illustrated his point by saying that we reminded him of a bunch of hogs he had observed a few days before under an acorn tree. They were so busily engaged in rooting for acorns that they never thought of looking up to see where they were coming from. These are fearsome days in which we live, days that try men's souls and it is extremely necessary that we guard every phase of our spiritual lives. If we are not careful, the more visible tasks, those at hand and on the earthly level will take up all our time. We must get still before the Lord as often as possible, simply rest as it were from it all and look up and search out the corners, the areas where it is so easy to neglect, lest cobwebs of neglect and indifference gather there and short-out our connection with the Master.
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