Nien Cheng, an older Chinese Christian woman, has written a book entitled Life and Death in Shanghai. The author spent six years in a Red Guard prison and was horribly, brutally tortured. She survived the whole thing, living year after year in a bare, damp, dank, dirty cell, hearing the screams of people being beaten to a pulp.

She tells of watching a small spider one day as it crawled slowly up one of the rust-eroded bars at the window. When it reached the top, suddenly it swung out and descended on a thin silken thread spun from the end of its body. With a leap and a swing, it secured the end of the thread to another bar, and then the spider crawled back along the silken thread to where it started.

Nien Cheng watched the tiny creature at work with increasing fascination. She wondered how it knew exactly where to take the next thread. There was no hesitation, no mistake, no haste. The tiny spider knew its job and carried it out with confidence.

Who had taught the spider to make such a web? she thought. Could it really have acquired the skill through evolution? Or did God create the spider and endow it with the ability to make a web so that it could catch food and perpetuate its species?She says she knew she had witnessed something extraordinarily beautiful and uplifting. She thanked God for the miracle she had just seen. Mao Zedong and all of his revolutionaries seemed much less menacing, and she felt the renewal of hope and confidence, for she had seen with this little spider that God was in control.

This story shows how a most despicable little creature, which most of us would just as soon step on, is a means of grace.