The Itsy-Bitsy Spider

"The Itsy-Bitsy Spider"
Hosea 2:14--3:1


The itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the water spout;
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out;
Out came the sun
and dried up all the rain;
And the itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the spout again.

Or, as in the poem by Richard Armour:
Shake and shake
The catsup bottle.
None will come out
And then a lot’ll.

It may sound trite, but it is nonetheless true:  Life is hard sometimes.  It not always brings roses without thorns, weedless lawns, and blue skies (or raincloud-filled skies, whichever you prefer).  Instead, there are at least little irritants along the way.

I like those lists of irritants that fall under the heading, “How To Tell It’s A Bad Day.”  Some of them go like this:
You know it’s a bad day when you jump out of bed and miss the floor.

You know it’s a bad day when your horn goes off accidentally and gets stuck when you’re following a group of Hell’s Angels down the highway.

You know it’s a bad day when you put both contact lenses in the same eye.

You know it’s a bad day if the bird singing outside your window is a vulture.

You know it’s a bad day when your wife says, “Good morning, Bill,” and your name is George.

You know it’s a bad day when your income tax refund check bounces.

You know it’s a bad day when your four year old says it’s almost impossible to flush a grapefruit down the toilet.

You know it’s a bad day when it costs more to fill up your car than it did to buy it.

You know it’s a bad day when the gypsy fortune teller offers to refund your money.


If all we had to face in life were little annoyances such as these, we might be able to do OK in life.  Maybe a lot better than OK.  But the problem is that beyond these little ripples there are some good sized waves.  They are the breakers that follow a series of smaller waves.  They hit us with a size and force great enough to knock us off our feet, pulling us down with its undertow.  It’s not the continual dreary shower, but the sudden stormy cloud burst that washes us from our high places of security.

There are those times when we feel like the deep sea diver in the Farside cartoon who was walking around in his heavy diving suit, investigating the ocean floor.  Then he looks up and sees the ship above him, to which he was connected by an air hose and lifeline, sinking down towards him.

How do you climb up the lifeline to a sinking ship?  The ship you thought was giving you your unfailing security has sunk.  Where does that leave you?  How do you survive wash-out experiences?  And probably more importantly, how do you, like the itsy bitsy spider, climb back up again?  And how do you do that knowing that the rain just might, and probably will, come again?


We need to turn our attention to Hosea in order to find some of the answers to these questions.  Hosea’s situation was a specific kind of wash-out experience.  We should be able to glean some understanding for our own particular situations.

This portion of the story of Hosea’s life begins at the point where God tersely commands him to, “Go get married.”  Can’t you just see Hosea fumbling around the marketplace, looking at all the women a little bit differently than he had before.  All the time he’s mumbling to himself, “Go get married, go get married…”  When he finally finds “the one,” she asks, “Why do you want to marry me?”
To which Hosea replies, “Because God told me to go get married.”  Not the most romantic proposal.

Hosea found a young woman who consented to whatever reason he gave her to get married.  They had three children--two boys and a girl--in quick succession.  Everything seemed rosy for this happy family.  Whatever the reason was behind God’s odd demand that he go get married, Hosea seemed to find married life quite to his liking.  Hosea was on his way up the waterspout.  But off in the distance a storm was brewing for him--one which no weatherman would have ever been able to predict.

When the rain finally began to fall, Hosea and his domestic dream life were severely pelted.  Everything crashed to the ground.  Hosea went running for cover, a bruised and humiliated man.  What happened was that his beautiful wife, the mother of his three children, Gomer, abruptly left him.  She turned in her wooden mixing spoons and apron and diapers for the life of a prostitute.

Every day, Hosea would go to the marketplace to buy his daily groceries.  He would have to watch his wife display herself for sale to any man who came along.  His heart would break as he saw the woman he had come to love, who bore his children, who had pledged herself to him and to him alone, calling out to any man passing by, disappear into a tent with some louse, come out a short time later only to snag another.  Our hearts must surely go out to Hosea.


I think there are at least three characteristics of the rain storm that dislodged Hosea, and would probably dislodge a lot of other people as well.

One of the characteristics is 90 degree change.  It’s a sharp, opposite direction shift from what was, to what is now.  This kind of change could happen in a person’s thinking, feelings, or ways of acting.  The change could involve a single individual or the relationship amongst a group of people.  Whatever it is, the changes people go through ripple out and affect others who are closest to that person.  The changes Gomer made, totally unsettled the life of her husband, Hosea; their three children; families, and ultimately the community.  Everyone has to adapt and deal with the stark shift Gomer made.

These kinds of drastic changes appear to happen suddenly, but I have found that lots of things have been going on in the person before the shift was ever noticed.  A change may have been going on for a long time.  What happens is that those washed out by such change suddenly “wake up” to it.  Looking back, they begin to piece together how this happened.

This could have happened in Hosea’s case.  He may have been blind to what was going on in Gomer’s life.  But he just didn’t want to accept it or believe it.  How her feelings and ways of acting were changing.  Being suffocated in a life that was not her, she finally made a drastic shift.  It woke up a lot of people about the kind of person she evidently was or wanted to be.  But by making that change, she washed out a lot of people’s lives with the rain storm of her choices.

Another characteristic of the rain storms of life is loss.  It’s hard to separate change from loss.  They both flow from the same thunder cloud.

Loss is experienced y most everyone.  Catastrophic loss is not.  Basically, catastrophic loss is the kind of loss of any major framework that we have built to hold us up.  The building material for that framework, that we thought was strong and stable, is what surprisingly and unbelievably crumbles.  That framework, that building material that holds up our lives may be something like the acceptance of those we love.  It might be the dreams that have beckoned us forward.  It might be the future we thought we were going to live into.  It might be the roles from which we gain our sense of self-respect.  It might be any number of meaningful values upon which our life has been based.  It might be the faith in God that we thought was supposed to get us through anything.  It total, it is the experience of having our foundations being cut out from under us.

One of the 17th century Swedish kings was Gustavus Aldophus.  He had a life long dream of building the mightiest warship.  He ordered such a ship to be built.  It was a splendid looking vessel that could carry 500 people as well as full armaments.  It was called the VASA.  King Gustavus swelled with pride as his prize ship was launched for the first time with two-gun salute.  A large crowd watched from the pier.  The VASA made it only a few yards out into the harbor and promptly sunk.

That’s what loss does to a person who has been washed out.  It makes you go back to the drawing board and start all over again.  Or throwing out the drawing board altogether.  There is so much mourning of the loss of time and plans and people and dreams that were spent in vain.  To what end!?  A sunken ship.  A sunken life.  What now?

The third characteristic is the final circle of a downward spiral.  It is the sense of hopelessness.  It is the debilitating thought that, “I will never make it back up again.”  It’s looking up the water spout and thinking, “I can’t do it; the rains are going to come again; and the fall will be worse.”

Like the character, Biff, in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, who said in desperation, “I can’t take hold, Mom; I can’t take hold of some kind of life.”  For Hosea, this characteristic may have been formed by such words as, “How can I ever love again?  How can I trust again?  How will anything ever change for the better with Gomer?  With anyone?  It can only get worse.”


Which all serves to bring us to the most important part of Hosea’s story.  God gives Hosea one further instruction, after the washout has taken place with his now very stray wife, Gomer.  God says to Hosea, “Start all over: Love your wife again, your wife who’s in bed with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife” (EHP).

Hosea has moved through the process of experiencing 90 degree angle change, involving a cutting and catastrophic loss, leading to an understandable hopelessness concerning the choices and actions of his wife Gomer.  Now God is asking Hosea to pull himself out of the rain swollen puddle and do it all over again--to go find Gomer and show his love for her.

How do you do that, if you are Hosea?  What does it take to risk doing what God is asking Hosea to do?  To start over again after love has not just been lost, but run over, backed up, run over again, backed up, run over again…  To get back up after life has beaten you down?  To climb the spout again?

Part of the answer comes from paying attention to the words God uses in making this request.  Notice that God doesn’t request that Hosea take Gomer back as his wife.  We may assume that is what’s behind the words of God, but that may be more presumption than assumption.  Instead, listen to the words:  “Start all over: Love your wife again…”

Think about those words.  Think what they mean.  Which would be harder for you to do:  Take Gomer back as your wife; or, Go and show your love?  If I was in that position it would be easier to take her back as my wife, led simply by a sense of duty, but with no love.  It would be much harder, if I were Hosea, to show any kind of love after the way Gomer had stepped all over it.

One of the networks put on a documentary about the Kentucky mountain folks.  They brought to New York a man who had spent his entire life in the mountains.  He was absolutely amazed at all he saw, having no idea something like that kind of a place existed.  But one thing he saw really stuck with him.  In the RCA building, he watched a little old lady walk up to a door.  It slid open and she walked into a box.  The doors closed.  A minute later the doors opened again, and out stepped a gorgeous brunette.  “You just can’t beat science,” he shouted.  “If I’d a know’d about that contraption, I’d a brought along my old lady.”

If God had asked us to start over like God did with Hosea, we would probably wish we had a contraption that would change Gomer over before we took her back.  Then it would be easy to show love again.  But the problem is, Hosea didn’t.  And neither do we.  We don’t have something that will magically transform our washout experiences into fascinating celebrations.

Again, as we ponder how we are able to climb back up the water spout, let’s pay attention to God’s statement to Hosea:  “Start all over: Love your wife again…”  Notice that God isn’t requesting that Gomer be the one to change.  God isn’t pushing Gomer into any contraption either.  The person God is asking to change is Hosea.  He is asking Hosea to change is attitude, his feelings, his heart toward Gomer.  That’s the only way Hosea will be able to start climbing back up.


I hope you’re seeing something much deeper here, as well.  This isn’t just a story about Hosea and Gomer.  It’s a story about God and God’s people.  We are the Gomers who leave our vows to God behind for the allurements of life without attachments.  We are the ones who once climbed to the heights with God.  But we made choices that washed us off those heights.  And then we chose to live on the ground.

God is the one who continually asks himself to start over, and love us again.  God knows we may not change.  But God has chosen to.  God has chosen not to get lost in his hurt and pain over our faithless ways.  Instead God continues to come to us and show his love for us, despite what he may get in return.

So God is not asking Hosea to do something that He (God) is not unwilling to do.  It has become a way of life for God in his love for us.