Kill the Spider Read online

  One of the hardest things to do is look at yourself honestly. And to do so without self-criticism—but with the passionate desire to improve your life for the sake of others—is even harder. Carlos Whittaker is a fitting guide for the journey. He will take you to the hard place and turn the light on. Nonsense living in the dark when a little light can create a more healthy, enjoyable life.

  DONALD MILLER

  In a world obsessed with outward appearances and dealing with the symptom, not the cause, it’s wildly refreshing to see Los dip far below the surface to address the real spiders that cause the real pain in our very real lives.

  JON ACUFF, New York Times bestselling author of Finish

  Carlos Whittaker has created a vehicle for all of us to better understand the aspects of our lives that prevent us from being free to grow and love without limitation. Kill the Spider is a masterpiece! I could not put it down. You won’t be able to either.

  SCOTT HAMILTON

  I really wish Carlos had not written this book. I wish he had written a book called Eat the Gumdrop or Ride the Unicorn, but he had the audacity to write Kill the Spider. This is not just a book, it’s a declaration of independence. Now that he’s faced his demons, the rest of us have no excuse not to face ours. You need this; it won’t feel good, but you need it.

  LEVI LUSKO, bestselling author of Swipe Right: The Life-and-Death Power of Sex and Romance

  In Kill the Spider, Carlos not only takes us on his journey to defeat the lies that were holding him down but gives us practical advice as to how to kill the spiders in our own life. I really loved this book and will be handing out a ton of copies to my friends.

  MIKE FOSTER

  Also by Carlos Whittaker

  Moment Maker: You Can Live

  Your Life or It Will Live You

  Ebook Instructions

  In this ebook edition, please use your device’s note-taking function to record your thoughts wherever you see the bracketed instructions [Your Notes]. Use your device’s highlighting function to record your response whenever you are asked to checkmark, circle, underline, or otherwise indicate your answer(s).

  ZONDERVAN

  Kill the Spider

  Copyright © 2017 by Carlos Enrique Whittaker

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

  Epub Edition August 2017 ISBN 9780310338017

  ISBN 978-0-310-33800-0 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-0-310-50004-9 (audio)

  ISBN 978-0-310-33801-7 (ebook)

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

  Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org).

  Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation. © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked CSB® are taken from the Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible®, and CSB®, are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

  Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Published in association with the literary agency of The Fedd Agency, Inc., Post Office Box 341973, Austin, Texas, 78734.

  Art direction: Curt Diepenhorst

  Interior design: Denise Froehlich

  First printing August 2017 / Printed in the United States of America

  Heather—

  These words are wrapped in your

  wisdom and warfare.

  My spiders never stood a chance.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. The Drive

  2. Cobwebs

  3. The Circle at OnSite

  4. The Seven-Year-Old Magician

  5. I Belonged to the Crazies

  6. Balderdash

  7. The Labyrinth

  8. The Satan Duplex

  9. From Craving to Cobweb

  10. Anxiety Attack

  11. Hatching Spiders

  12. Prayer

  13. Interlude

  14. All Is Lost

  15. God Wants to Give Us Disney World

  16. Breakthrough

  17. Kill the Spider

  18. Weapons of War

  It’s Your Turn

  A Final Prayer

  INTRODUCTION

  My family recently moved to a new home on the south side of Nashville. “New” is probably a little misleading, but what can I say? It’s new to us. Actually, it’s a 1955 ranch-style home on a corner lot in a great neighborhood. I like the corner lot because that means more people can see how incredibly manicured I keep my lawn—way better than if I were living at the end of a cul-de-sac. (Yeah. I’m that guy.) Four bedrooms, three baths. A finished basement and a garage with a shop. Move over Cleavers. The Beaver’s hood had nothing on Los’s new hood.

  We’d been in the house just a few months before we took off for a summer road trip, leaving the house to pet sitters and a few guests who needed a place to lay their heads as they passed through Nashville.

  We were on a stretch of deserted highway in the middle of nowhere Wyoming when a friend staying at our house called Heather, clearly rattled. The panic in our friend’s voice came through loud and clear even though I couldn’t hear what was being said. I braced myself for the upcoming conversation where we’d have to tell our kids that their dog Pope had tragically died in some unfortunate set of circumstances.

  “Really? Are you sure?” Heather asked our guest. “I’ve never seen one the entire time we’ve lived there. Okay. That’s fine. Okay. Just tell me how much,” Heather said in a calm cadence over the phone. What in the world were they talking about? Heather hung up the phone.

  “Natalie said she saw a spider on her bed. She thinks it’s a brown recluse,” Heather explained. “She’s kinda unnerved about it.”

  “There’s no way it was a brown recluse. It was probably just a garden spider. Tell her to stay upstairs and out of the basement. It’s no big deal. We will deal with it when we get back,” I replied.

  Fast forward four weeks. Road trip done. We pulled back into our driveway on the corner lot. Manicured lawn looks good. Life is good.

  Immediate chaos commenced. Five Whittakers and 41,233 pieces of luggage. When we walked into the house it felt different than when we’d left. Not bad. Just different. When a home is lived in by five people on a daily basis, the smells from the kitchen, the dirt from the nine-year-old shoes, the chao
s of the tweens’ lives spills over everything. The house lacked the right smells, touches, and life. It was clean, but lonely looking. Ah, well. It’d be back to usual soon, I reasoned.

  In the back of my mind was Natalie’s run-in with that “brown recluse” spider. I still wasn’t convinced that’s what it was, but something about that cobweb had me peeking under every pillow.

  “Change the sheets on your beds, kids,” I yelled out. Funny how that spider sighting a few weeks earlier was suddenly bothering me more than it was when I was in Wyoming. As we settled into our evening rhythms, everything felt right. It smelled right. We had an incredible evening together, snuggling our 115-pound Bernese mountain dog and apologizing profusely for leaving him for so long. At the end of the night, Heather crawled in bed and was reading one of her Amish love-story novels. I was watching Sports Center in the living room and the kids were sucking up all the Wi-Fi they had been deprived of in the minivan. That’s when I heard the scream. Not a yell, no, it was a scream. It came from my bedroom. I was halfway there when I saw Heather running and stripping off her pajamas. What in the world?!

  “It’s a spider! It was a spider on our bed, Carlos. On our bed. You have to find it and kill it. Go find it. I want to move. This is not okay. Go find it. OMG,” Heather spilled out.

  I found the spider. It was a brown recluse. And it was on my bed. In a matter of five seconds, the most important thing in my life was ridding my home of spiders. Funny how I was fine putting a Band-Aid on the problem before, telling poor Natalie to just “move upstairs,” and now I was ready to drop a nuclear bomb on my house to get rid of the problem.

  I had a “spider guy” at my house by noon the next day, and extermination began. It was a month before we were free of spiders. We not only had to exterminate them, we had to fill any holes in the cracks of our walls, ceilings, and closets that they could sneak through.

  “This summer heat has these recluses coming out into the open,” the spider guy said. “Every neighborhood with houses like yours, built in the fifties are calling me. Everybody has spiders. It’s just nobody does anything about it until they come out of hiding.”

  This exterminator just dropped a truth bomb.

  The scenario at my house creeped you out, right? Good. It’s kind of a metaphor for where I found my soul recently: freaked out, adrenaline rushing, blood pumping in my ears, feeling terrible and seriously abandoned, anxiety at an all-time high. And it had nothing to do with spiders in my home and everything to do with spiders in my heart.

  Here’s the thing: There was something sinister in my life—something I didn’t even know was there—and it was threatening my life. It almost cost me everything.

  Anyone who knows me will tell you: I love telling stories. So much so that I’ve found a way to do it for a living, speaking at conferences and churches, leading people in worship, and vlogging our family adventures on YouTube. Often my beautiful wife and three amazing kids come along and we just have great adventures, drinking deep of every drop of the good life. It’s not a stretch to say I’m living the dream. What’s not to love? I get to make a living pointing to the Good News—that God is here for us in every season of life no matter how you feel. He is right there. God animates my life, constantly extending grace and power to me, blessing me over and over again. And I get to tell people about this goodness—for a living!

  And yet (comes the dreaded next line), not too long ago I woke up to the reality that I was stuck, repeatedly messing up. I was hurting people and bringing shame and stress on myself and my family, even while I was lifting up the name of Jesus, striving to live in communion with Him, and doing all I could think of to glorify the name of Jesus. Traveling the world, seeing that same Good News transform lives, I was still somehow doing destructive things and hurting the people I love most.

  How is this even possible? How can a person lift up the name of Jesus with one hand and simultaneously destroy his own life with the other? Do you know what I mean? Have you been there? Can I get an amen? Have you ever thrown up your hands, wondering why in the world you keep feeling more like the prodigal son gone back to the hog pen and wishing you could eat their slop, even after you’ve already been welcomed back into your Father’s arms? Have you ever wondered, “Why in the world do I keep making the same mistakes?” Maybe you’ve realized you have some addictive behaviors. Maybe fear has motivated your decisions more often than you’d like. Or—and this is a big one—maybe you know Jesus is your Savior, but somehow you still feel like you need saving. It’s a never-ending battle, and you just can’t win. People, this is the book for you.

  Truth is, that’s the perplexing mind-set I was in when something crazy happened. I had a pretty miserable, phenomenal, mind-blowing week on a farm just outside Nashville that turned into an epic mountaintop kind of experience. The kind of experience that changes a person from the inside out. The kind you can’t help but share. That’s why I’m coming clean, sharing my story. My story about hunting down the spider.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DRIVE

  I figured I needed therapy. I mean, let’s be honest, we all are a little bit crooked inside and could use some Yoda-like guidance on this journey called life. Personally, I had this recurring pattern of making the same sorts of bad decisions over and over again. So, of course, therapy was probably a good idea.

  I had been a regular visitor in Al’s office for months. We had taken the spotlight of grace and shined it on all my sins. We had uncovered glimpses of hope in war-torn seasons. We had dug deep and found that buried deep beneath this mess of a man was a monumental man. I remember the day like it was yesterday. We had just achieved a massive breakthrough. I couldn’t wait to get home and share with Heather what we had uncovered. And then he said it.

  “I think you need to go to this place called OnSite.”

  “OnSite? Is that a mountain one climbs to declare to the world he is finally healed? If so, I’m in!”

  “Well, not really. It’s a seven-day experiential-therapy retreat.”

  Insert screeching brake sounds here.

  “Um, Al? Didn’t I just hit a milestone? Haven’t we uncovered stuff over the last two years that makes the torturous experience such as the one you just described needless? Why in the world would anyone go somewhere to have therapy for seven straight days?” I asked. Okay, so it was more like a plea.

  Two years, twice a month, and sometimes more. And the man I’ve spilled my deepest, darkest secrets to tells me to go to rehab!

  “It’s not like rehab, Carlos. It’s experiential therapy. Not experimental therapy. It’s really cool. I’ve actually gone myself. I think it will be the push you need to get you over the hump.”

  I realized two very important things: (1) Two years of therapy had not gotten me over “the hump” after all, and (2) just seven days of nonstop therapy could.

  I exhaled deeply, thanked Al, told him I’d look into it, and went on my way. Four weeks later I found myself in a minivan with my suitcase, my wife, and my three kids.

  “Daddy? Where are we taking you again?” the middle child asked.

  “It’s called OnSite. It’s a place where Daddy is going to go work on fixing some things inside him.”

  “Is it like church?”

  “No, baby. It’s not like church. It’s not a Christian place. It’s more like summer camp for grownups. I’ll be staying in a cabin with roommates I don’t know yet. I think I saw that there was a horseshoe pit in the brochure. And I heard I get to play with horses!”

  The more I described this place out loud to my nine-year-old, the more I wanted to tell Heather to turn the van around. What in the world was I thinking?

  “Daddy,” the nine-year-old said, “how are they going to fix you without Jesus?”

  That question echoed in my head for at least fifteen seconds before I replied, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  About fifteen minutes from OnSite, I realized I had not called my parents yet. This was a big
deal only because I was going dark for the next seven days. One of the commitments you make when you go to this experience is that you relinquish any outside communication for the entirety of the program. So no phone calls, no email, no texts, no Twitter, no Netflix, no Netflix, no Netflix.

  You actually have to give them your phones.

  Lord come quickly. Seven days.

  I grabbed my phone back from Losiah, my six-year-old, who was playing Candy Crush. I had the fleeting thought that maybe he was the one in need of therapy when he burst into tears for making him surrender my phone.

  I called my parents.

  The thing about calling my parents is that, inevitably, it becomes an event. One parent will always tell me not to say anything until the other parent is near the phone. Then they put me on speaker, which results in both parties having to repeat absolutely everything at least three times. It’s hardly efficient, but it’s us.

  “Okay. So, where are you going again, mijito?” my mom asked.

  “I’m going on a retreat, Mom. It’s like a counseling retreat. For seven days.”

  By this point, the word retreat was mocking me. I wasn’t quite sure what else to call this, but I was pretty sure “communication prison” was not uplifting enough.

  “Why are you going? Did you do something wrong? Is everything okay?”

  “Mom. It’s okay. We could all use some counseling every so often. Maybe not quite this much, but at least some.” This is why I love my mother. She always believes the best in her son—as should all mothers.

  “Everything is fine. Honestly though, I don’t know why I’m going. I just know that I’ve gone my entire life receiving blessing after blessing, and then rubbing crap on it. Maybe I’m going there to stop ruining the good things in my life.”

  “I don’t think you do that,” she replied.

  I love my mother.

  And then, like a Morgan Freeman voice-over in some epic commercial, my dad spoke up.

  “Can I tell you a story?”