An Invisible Thread

An Invisible Thread

I spied it out of the corner of my eye as I stepped through the back door: a brown leaf, suspended in midair, spinning in the breeze in a singular, impossible dance. It seemed to defy gravity, but when I came closer, I saw that it hung from an invisible thread—the thinnest of filaments spun by an unseen, industrious spider.

I grabbed my phone and began snapping away. Honestly, who wants to shoot selfies when ordinary miracles abound right in your own backyard?

After lining up a few shots, I tucked the phone away, but I thought about that leaf all day—and about the invisible threads that hold us, too. About the filaments of faith that keep us aloft and help us to spin and dance, even against impossible odds.

“Now faith,” said the writer of Hebrews, “is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen” (11:1, ESV). While I couldn’t see the spider’s thread, I was certain the leaf was attached to something. (Gravity is an absolute, after all.) But my faith is also attached to something: the solid, unseen weight of God’s eternal power and glory.

Poet Emily Dickinson discovered the “conviction of things not seen” in nature, too—and extrapolated from it a divine apologetic:

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet know I how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,

Nor visited in heaven;

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the chart were given.

The thread that holds us may be invisible at times, but we are held nonetheless. The leaf I saw appeared fragile—and at the mercy of the unpredictable wind. But its dance was lovely, and its connection to something fixed and unmoving was utterly undeniable. And so it is with you and me.

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Hebrews 11:3, NKJV