The Walkway with the Spider

Despite my debilitating fear of the huntsman variety (which are freakily big, fast, scary-looking even in death, and not what you want to wake up to find you’ve slept on all night… thanks a lot little brother who thought it would be funny to put one in my bed!), I’m not all that afraid of spiders. Sure, I wouldn’t keep them as a pet or study them for a living, but they’re okay. Especially those almost invisible daddy-longlegged ones.

My two-year-old daughter, on the other hand, is terrified of all of them. I don’t think it helps at all that her four-year-old sister points out every spider she sees. And names them. ‘Spidergirl’ is a yellow and black one living in our garden, ‘Lizzie’ is Spidergirl’s slightly smaller friend, and ‘Spiderman’ was a six-legged daddy-longlegs living in our garage.

It’s Spiderman who’s been causing trouble for the last two months. While my four-year-old stopped to talk to him, my two-year-old won’t go anywhere near him – which is a problem given the only way to get into the house from the garage is via the spider. She’d stand beside her car door and beg me to carry her past.

Spiderman was only there for a week before moving on. I’ve been trying to convince my daughter for a month that it’s safe to walk past that particular spot, but there’s been no convincing her. Until last week.

We’d just come home from shopping and I had my arms full. She was standing there, like she usually does as she waits for me to walk with her, but then she surprised me. She took two tentative steps then walked determinedly to the other end of the garage. A metre ‘past Spiderman’, she stopped and turned back to me with the biggest grin on her face. I was so proud of her, I almost cried. I couldn’t put into words the pride I felt right then, knowing how much courage that three metre walk had taken.

But even as I stood there, shopping in my arms, praising her as I tried not to cry, I realised something – I was the only one who knew what an achievement that had been for her. To anyone else – her sister and dad even – it would have just looked like she was walking into the house like everyone else. No big deal. And yet, it was. And she and I alone knew it.

We all have fears. Some of them are big and completely understandable, acceptable even. Fear of public speaking, spiders, flying, failure, heights. People expect people to be afraid of those things. But alongside them are the fears that make little or no logical sense, the ones we hide because they’re almost laughworthy – and yet, we’re not laughing.  They’re just as real, if not more so, because they’re so personal.   

For me, among other things, I have an almost irrational fear of making phone calls. Emails, SMS, face to face – totally fine. Love them. Actual phone calls? With the exception of family, I’ll do almost anything to get out of making them. I’m better these days than I used to be – mainly because I have kids and therefore don’t have a choice (who else is going to make their doctors’ appointments???) – but I still get nervous every time I call someone and take a while to calm down after. I fake it, pretend I’m totally confident to the person on the other end, but I’m shaking inside. I make myself lists of everything I have to say/ask beforehand because I get so flustered I forget why I’m even calling. Even then, I usually miss half of it.

I made three phone calls the other day within the space of half an hour. I made two different medical appointments and called the library to sort out a problem with my library card. My to-do list had a huge smiley face beside it when I’d finished but that was nothing compared to the sense of achievement I felt.

As I sat there, smiling to myself at the grand feat I’d just pulled off, I knew that no one else would appreciate it. No one knew I’d just faced my fears and won.

But God did. There, in that moment, God smiled with me. He knew.

God sees our fears. The big ones, the small ones, the rational and irrational ones, the ones that make us merely nervous and the ones that make us shake so bad we can’t even move.

And like me with my daughter, he stands there, so proud he could burst as he watches us conquer them. Others might not know what an achievement you just conquered, but God does.

He sees, he knows and boy is he proud of you!