A spider. Yes, a spider of all things taught me a great lesson yesterday (very fitting for this time of year, don't you think?). First of all, let's just say that I disdain spiders. I end up paralyzed whenever I encounter one. Yesterday, however, this small, creepy creature reminded me of some important truths. I was on my way to my parent's house for a family Halloween party and right around the Lehi area, I noticed something on my windshield. There, dead center, was a small spider (on the outside of the windshield that is). My first reaction was fear and I almost turned my windshield wipers on, but that fear quickly turned to amazement. How was this little guy holding onto my windshield so tightly? I would expect that he'd be blown right off at freeway speeds. I marveled the whole way home as he tagged along for the ride. I eventually got to my exit and had to stop at the light, and in response, my little friend slowly made his way toward my windshield wipers and climbed into a small crevice as he finally had relief from the wind. I considered trying to find him when I got home since I knew he was still on my car, but decided I'd let him do whatever he wanted after he had made it that far.
So, being a nerd, I wanted to do a little research about the strength of a spider's grip. I found quite a few articles and want to share a bit about what I learned. I'm guessing some of you out there already know this, but here it is anyway:
"A team from Germany and Switzerland have made the first detailed examinations of a jumping spider's 'foot' and have discovered that a molecular force sticks the spider to almost anything. The force is so strong that these spiders could carry over 170 times their own body weight while standing on the ceiling. This is the first time anyone has measured exactly how spiders stick to surfaces, and how strong the adhesion force is. The team used a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to make images of the foot of a jumping spider. There is a tuft of hairs on the bottom of the spider's leg, and each individual hair is covered in more hairs. These smaller hairs are called setules, and they are what makes the spider stick. The force these spiders use to stick to surfaces is the van der Waals force, which acts between individual molecules that are within a nanometre of each other (a nanometre is about ten thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair). The team used a technique called Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to measure this force. The flexible contact tips of the setules are triangular and they have an amazingly high adhesive force on the underlying surface."
So there you have it. Setules keep a spider on your bedroom ceiling, on your wall at work, or on your windshield while driving on the freeway :) I thought this was pretty cool and couldn't help but find connections to the gospel and trials. I watched that spider the whole way home and wondered how long he would hold on. I imagine the thirty minutes or so that he was stuck there, probably felt like a lifetime to him. So this got me thinking, what are my "setules" during trying times? Or what are the things that help me to "hold on" when going through something hard? The answers are simple, but are sometimes forgotten or just not utilized. They may include prayer, scripture study, faith, service, temple worship, fasting, an attitude of gratitude, etc. These are things that will help us come to know our Savior, Jesus Christ, and as we make him our rock, the very foundation of our lives (our windshield if you will), we will not be overcome by the winds of life; but will, as I'm sure my spider friend found, be strengthened, refined, and more qualified to enter the Kingdom of God.
