I've been bitten.

Sometimes the web won’t come. The end of the line. The freedom and joy has become monotony and duty. What once was a pursuit of passion has become the folly of mortals following after the wild insanity of a falsified reality.

Spiderman caught me in the web tonight. Peter’s humanity shown through his spider costume. He became a real character for me. Struggling to define himself in a world where definition is in the suit you wear and not the (super - in this case "spider") man underneath. Somewhere along the line, he became so caught in the web of do-gooding and self-denial that he forgot why he began in the first place.

Peter had a higher calling. He wasn’t a fluke of nature. His future was determined when the spider forever changed his life. From then on he was a new man. A different kind of man. Even though he attempts to do too much in an effort to validate his own worth, he can not deny his calling to fight on behalf of society.

The web's malfunction wasn’t the problem, Peter’s mindset was. He lost “focus” on his real calling. He had become so distracted by trying to please people that he had lost his own pleasure, he had forgotten that he enjoyed helping people; that his helplessness in the death of Uncle Ben did not have to happen to those around him. Peter is Spiderman, Spiderman is Peter. There’s no separating them. Spiderman is part of his identity - they are seamlessly interwoven. He had merely lost the focus he needed to fulfil his life's calling.

Only when Peter realizes this is he able to fully admit his true love for Mary Jane. She knew he wasn’t giving her his full heart, he had to be himself to love her correctly. In the end, he finds himself. He finds a Peter whose only duty is to use the talent he’s been given for the good of others. Holding it in for himself is nothing short of cheating. MJ catches hold of it too. She just wanted his honesty.

We can not change who we are in Christ. We can not pretend to be something we are not. For those saved by Christ, we live a double life if we do not fully embody the life of Christ to all people at all times. We become confused when we try to segment our lives in different ways. When we try to live for ourselves at times and for Christ at others, we become confused at the core of who we are.

Yet – when we live in all aspects according to the Spirit, we become full and complete. Working for the good of everyone around us as well as ourselves is not a duty, it is our passion and delight. When we take seriously God’s commands to love God with all of our lives we find that to live is Christ and to die is gain. We find our being in him and our death greater than all else.

Until this is realized, loving others, loving God and being content with who we are in Christ will not jive. Peter is in the Spiderman costume because it is who he is on the inside, not who he becomes when he puts of the suit.

I am in Christ all the time, not because of the good deeds of religious life, but because I am a new creation in Christ from the inside out, created to do good works which he prepared in advance for me to do.

Whole-life discipleship requires commitment, practice and sacrifice. Whole-life discipleship yields joy, freedom, and change.