butterflies

This is probably going to border on corny at some point, but I am utterly sincere in my excitement of this!

I just finished reading Francis Chan's book Forgotten God. In the book, which is about the Holy Spirit, Chan says that he asked his wife if she ever thought about what a caterpillar thinks about. For a while it just crawls and eats, then it goes to sleep, and bang, next thing you know, it emerges with the ability to fly! He posits, does the butterfly ever think that it is still a caterpillar, and forget that it has wings and a new body? He makes the connection to the fact that believers are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, and often do not act any differently than they did before.

So, I started thinking, how exactly does a caterpillar complete the physical process of becoming a butterfly? Yes, I learned back in elementary school that it makes a cocoon and one day emerges as a butterfly. But really, how in the world does that happen? Where does the pudgy body go? Where do WINGs come from?

Well my friends, according to the experts at Wikipedia, once that pudgy body gets into the cocoon, it excretes digestive juices that break down cells leaving a few behind that grow into a new body, using the nutrients from the broken cells to build the new ones.

So, to continue the spiritual analogy here, I suppose one could say that the old flesh of the caterpillar is put to death, and the new body of the butterfly is made. There is death of the old to make way for the new. Is there a better picture of the transformation that the Spirit makes molding believers into the image of Christ? The old must die, and the new will be made.

And when the new is made, there is the temptation to live as if a change has not taken place. How foolish would the butterfly be to not use it's new wings? To remain grounded when it can take flight? But I often meet the day racking my brain for how I am to serve the Lord, and trying to drum up the desire to do it. I have the Holy Spirit! I have God's very spirit in me to give me direction, and desire to be like my Lord. Why do I persist in trying to figure out how to be a follower of Christ all by myself? Use your wings! (and we have reached the cory threshold, hopefully without compromising the message itself)