Yesterday I was reading an article on butterfly’s.  I have always loved butterfly’s and my cousin Joey called me “Butterfly” throughout my childhood. I found it so amazing that our lives are so similar to theirs. They first start out as an egg. When the egg finally hatches, most of you would expect for a butterfly to emerge, right?  Well, not exactly. This is only the first process.

When the egg hatches, the caterpillar will start his work and eat the leaf they were born onto. This is really important because the mother butterfly needs to lay her eggs on the type of leaf the caterpillar will eat – each caterpillar type likes only certain types of leaves. Since they are tiny and cannot travel to a new plant, the caterpillar needs to hatch on the kind of leaf it wants to eat. They have to do a lot of work in order to emerge into a beautiful butterfly. Just like us throughout life, we have to go through some stages of life that are not too comfortable, in order to grow into who God wants us to be.

Here you see the third stage. The pupa stage is one of the coolest stages of a butterfly’s life.  As soon as a caterpillar is done growing and they have reached their full length/weight, they form themselves into a pupa, also known as a chrysalis.  From the outside of the pupa, it looks as if the caterpillar may just be resting, but the inside is where all of the action is.  Inside of the pupa, the caterpillar is rapidly changing. Now, as most people know, caterpillars are short, stubby and have no wings at all.  (Sounds just like me prior to Christ coming into my life, I had no wings, not the short and stubby part 🙂  Within the chrysalis, the old body parts of the caterpillar are undergoing a remarkable transformation, called ‘metamorphosis,’ to become the beautiful parts that make up the butterfly that will emerge. Tissue, limbs and organs of a caterpillar have all been changed by the time the pupa is finished, and is now ready for the final stage of a butterfly’s life cycle. I love “the old parts are undergoing a remarkable transformation.” It reminds me of how God can take all the old parts of our past, and turn them into something beautiful.

Finally, when the caterpillar has done all of its forming and changing inside the pupa, if you are lucky, you will get to see an adult butterfly emerge.  When the butterfly first emerges from the chrysalis, both of the wings are going to be soft and folded against its body. This is because the butterfly had to fit all its new parts inside of the pupa. See, when we start dealing with our issues, and get to the root of our issue, that is when we began to grow into our new life. When we are doing all that hard work to have the life that Christ wants us to have. Getting rid of all the old stuff and leaving it behind, it is then that God can create the beautiful life in us that He wants you to have. As soon as the butterfly has rested after coming out of the chrysalis, it will pump blood into the wings in order to get them working and flapping – then they get to fly.  Usually within a three or four-hour period, the butterfly will master flying.

Don’t you want to master flying as high as God wants you to? Please write to Ronnie and I and let us know how we can help you to do just that!

Let’s fly high,

Ronnie and Christie Bruce