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To Someday Be A Butterfly


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. 

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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