The caterpillar doesn’t know what’s coming. It crawls, eats, and lives a life that seems complete. What more could it want? Then, one day it decides it’s had enough, and it burrows away in the security of its retirement cocoon, certain that its life is over and done.
Its cocoon is a prison from which it can never escape. The irony is that the cocoon doesn’t entrap the caterpillar. Rather, the caterpillar spins its own private prison bars. One thread at a time, the deed is done, and the creature is bound for all eternity.
Or so it would seem.
God views the walls we build around ourselves differently. We may drive ourselves into debt, and it might be our anger that forces our family to abandon us. Our health issues may very well come from our own raucous and irresponsible lifestyle. These things form our prison walls, trapping us in our misery, and we feel we cannot escape
God doesn’t want us to escape.
Don’t stop reading here. Think of the caterpillar. It’s bound tightly in its cocoon, and to passersby, it seems its life is over. The caterpillar appears dead.
It’s not. Inside its prison walls, it’s being remade into something more beautiful than it ever could have been had it chosen to retain its freedom as a caterpillar. When its prison walls crumble around it, out crawls the butterfly. It appears broken for a moment, then its glory unfurls, and it becomes the most magnificent of God’s creatures.
Think about the children of Israel. They were carried into captivity by the king of Babylon and kept behind bars for seventy years. They must have felt their lives were over, that they would never know the taste of freedom again. But like the caterpillar, they were being remade into something better and more beautiful. Ezra 2:2 begins the list of those who were repatriated to their homeland by Cyrus the king.
Ezra 2:69 tells of the new attitude of the Israelites when it came time to worship the Lord:
“They gave after their ability unto the treasury of the work threescore and one thousand drams of gold, and five thousand pounds of silver, and one hundred priests’ garments.”
The caterpillars had been transformed into butterflies, and as they fluttered their wings in the sunshine of their new freedom, they shimmered in the eyes of God, and he found them magnificent, indeed.
When we focus on God, we are always beautiful to him.
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Code: FGO.E.12.15.vp.kjv