It didn't try
to be beautiful or colorful, yet it happened.
It didn't intend to float seemingly effortlessly in
the air and spend its days among the flowers, yet it
does. It doesn't remember its former life as a
caterpillar or the struggles it went through to
become the finished work that it now is.
We look at a butterfly and think, "How pretty!", but
we tend to forget that it was once a caterpillar.
A creepy crawly bug that eats our garden plants and
is rarely welcome in sharing our picnic lunch.
I don't know that anyone but God fully understands
the purpose behind the caterpillar / butterfly
metamorphosis process but never the less, it occurs.
I sometimes wonder if it isn't an object lesson more
than anything else. A lesson in the process of
growing spiritually. The caterpillar eats and
grows until it can't fit into it's skin anymore, but
instead of making the transformation into a
butterfly at that point it bursts out of the old
skin with a new one underneath, and that happens
again and again until finally - when it is ready, it
emerges as what it was intended to be and flies
away.
We too go through stages of growth - spiritually.
Each time I think I understand a deeper truth
about God and am ready to fly off in the "knowledge"
of that truth I find that, instead of wings, I have
another layer of skin to grow into and ultimately
out of.
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Struggles and growth are all part of that mysterious
process of sanctification. Each trial that we
face serves to strengthen us, whether we choose to
believe that or not.
In their book, Faith In The Night Seasons, Chuck &
Nancy Missler use an analogy that goes something
like this:
"A man found a cocoon of an emperor moth. He took
it home so that he could watch the moth come out of
the cocoon. On the day a small opening
appeared, he sat and watched the moth for several
hours as it struggled to force its body through that
little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any
progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as
far as it could and could go no farther. It
just seemed to be stuck. The man, in his
kindness, decided to help the moth. So he took
a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit
of cocoon. The moth then emerged easily, but
it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.
The man continued to watch the moth because he
expected that, at any moment, the wings would
enlarge and expand to be able to support the body,
which would then contract in him. Neither
happened! In fact, the little moth spent the
rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body
and shriveled wings. It never was able
to fly."
How many times do we cry out to God for help and
deliverance from whatever trial we happen to be
going through. The silence from heaven
disappoints, or even infuriates us and we ask, "God,
why aren't you doing something?".
He is doing something - He's letting
our wings grow.
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