Last October, a blue swallowtail caterpillar made its way up into our door wall, between the glass and screen. Over the course of several days, my daughters and I watched it meticulously and intentionally form its cocoon. A few weeks later, in typical Wisconsin fashion, the weather drastically shifted to freezing temperatures. I have a weak spot for animals…and in my book a caterpillar is close enough…so I watched a few youtube videos on caterpillar wrangling (yes, it’s a real thing) and reasoned that even if I botched the transfer, moving it’s chrysalis inside was kinder than letting it endure our nine months of winter. I announced that if it ever hatched into a butterfly, I would name it Hope.
Once I had it secured in a netted butterfly cage, I put it down in the storage area of our basement. As the seasons changed, I’d go down there to get out holiday decorations and box up clothes that the girls had outgrown. I’d glance at the chrysalis but there was never any change.
Finally, I decided it had to be dead. Almost six months had passed since the squishy bright green caterpillar crawled off of my cilantro plant and into my screen door. All that could be seen of it now was a hard grayish brown cocoon. The life that had transformed into that, now seemed a distant memory. I made a mental note to myself that the next time I was down in the storage room, I needed to throw it out.
Then one evening in late March, Chris came up from the basement holding the butterfly cage and said, “Look!” Hope had hatched! And she was beautiful. Far more majestic than the caterpillar she used to be. We fed her sugar water and fruit and marveled at her over the next few days, talking about how sometimes the things that appear dead in our lives are actually in a waiting period undergoing life-changing transformation we couldn’t see and very much alive.
God often allows long periods of waiting in our lives...It can be tempting to feel like God is no longer working...but let me encourage you, that if you are His child, He is working. He is transforming your faith, your prayer life, and your heart...into a more beautiful reflection of His Son, Jesus.
We were approaching Easter and Hope, the butterfly, was a poignant visual reminder of Christ’s lifeless body that was laid in a cold stone tomb. He lay there three days…causing His closest friends and His own mother to assume death had prevailed. When He rose on Easter morning, He was transformed into a more glorious version of Himself and He brought with Him hope….that would be for ALL the people (Luke 2: 10-11). Hope that through His death and resurrection, He can take all the dead areas of our lives and make them alive and beautiful again.
True hope had hatched!
God often allows long periods of waiting in our lives. These periods of waiting seem even more common when you live with chronic health conditions. We’re often waiting for a diagnosis, waiting for relief from the pain, waiting for someone to understand our pain, or waiting for someone to fix our pain. It can be tempting to feel like God is no longer working in that area of our life but let me encourage you, that if you are His child, He is working. He is transforming your faith, your prayer life, and your heart of worship into a more beautiful reflection of His Son, Jesus. Don’t waste those opportunities. Don’t be tempted to view them as dead and “throw them out”. Without great sorrow, great joy is impossible.
A B. Simpson said, “Allow God time to work and He surely will. Then the very trials that threatened to overcome you with discouragement and disaster will become God’s opportunity to reveal His grace and glory in your life, in ways you have never known before.”
“My God will meet all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19).
