On a journey to address some of his major shortcomings and challenges in life, Carlos Whittaker enters into a pretty intense therapy retreat. Don’t let the therapy idea scare you. It’s not filled with therapeutic dialogue. It’s one man’s journey to finding the root cause of the troubles he’s facing. The premise of the book is pretty simple. You can’t simply clear up the spiderwebs and expect them to stay away. You must deal with the spiders!

The simple writing style lends itself to be an easy read for sure. A rainy weekend and you might just finish this book in a few short days. Whittaker takes us along for a ride as he journeys to finding his spiders! He makes some assertions that we all deal with spiders but feel more comfortable clearing spider webs. There’s some truth to that for sure. It’s easy to say that alcoholism is the problem or pornography is the problem or stealing is the main issue but in reality they are just outward signs of a deeper rooted something going on inside us.

The main point of the book is discovering the author’s own spider and then finding ways to kill it. Without ruining the whole book he does provide four key points at the end of the book to show how to deal with the spider once it’s found. He uses four keys to help us understand this better. To properly dispose of the spider you confess, renounce, reject, and replace. While reading the book, knowing that I’m more alliterative than I should be, I jumped to make these all “R” words and then even added a fifth one as I was talking it over with a friend.

Once we confess (repent) of the root cause of our troubles, we’ll be more positioned to renounce it (no longer let it define us). Then we forcibly reject every lie this spider ever told us. We reject them and then replace these lies with a specific truth from the Bible that overcomes the lie. And finally we repeat because let’s be honest, this is not going to be a one and done process! While the author indicates that this is a process that could need repeated, I personally feel he doesn’t emphasize how long this could take, which is why adding the fifth step was important for me.

Now don’t jump right to killing the spider with these 5 steps until you actually know what you’re trying to kill! Take the time to process the information and see what truth you need to hear. What is spinning all of those webs in your life? What lies are you starting to believe? These are just a couple of the questions that need addressed before attempting to slay the giant spider hiding in the darkest corners of your life.

No spider is too big. No web is too strong. Kill the spider and the webs will soon disappear!