Butterfly Season

Are you in your butterfly season? Well, first let’s look at the season of the caterpillar:

Everything goes really slow but steady. It seems like it takes so much effort to get anywhere spiritually. You do a lot of feeding on spiritual things, but they may not make any sense. You may read a lot of spiritual books and the Bible, go to church a lot, go to a lot of fellowship meals, join a lot of groups, try to hook up with God by working really hard. You are full of yourself, but feel great spiritually. You are trying to convince yourself of many things spiritually, but in your quiet times (which you make sure don’t happen much), you don’t feel much different on the inside. Still, you stay so busy you don’t have to go there too much.

Then comes the cocoon stage:

During this stage you may feel discouraged or depressed. You might feel like you are in a really dark, confining place with God and like not much is happening. During this phase, it might look like everybody has turned their backs on you. It could also look like everybody has discovered you because you are being worked to death but feel empty inside.

You have your good Christian identity mask firmly in place so nobody knows— including yourself—how destitute you really are. You have gorged yourself on spiritual things, worked hard to prove to God that you deserve to belong to Him, but you don’t feel a bit more alive than when you started. In fact, it looks like everybody is advancing in all things spiritual while you are not hearing anything and feel lost.

Then comes the stage of emerging:

During this stage, you feel like you are being squeezed from every direction very hard. You can get really angry at everybody, including and especially God and yourself. During this stage, you get to see things from God’s perspective. It doesn’t look like God is who He says He is. You think all His promises are for naught. You are tired of working and trying so hard and not getting anywhere.

You have been transformed into a butterfly, but you don’t know it yet. You are struggling to get out of that place you are in. Sometime during this phase, you usually realize that your motives for all your hard work are not pure. You realize your need of God and not His need of you.

You cry out for your true identity, and you begin the process of receiving from God, believing and trusting in Him and Him alone. You suddenly begin to understand some of the deeper things you have studied and become thankful at a new level for God’s mercy and grace for yourself and not just everybody else.

Then come the stage of resting:

In this stage, you are the most vulnerable. Like a newly emerged butterfly, you need to rest, dry, discover your transformation. You need to gain strength and courage to fly.

During this stage, you find that God is really all you need. You learn to wait, and rest, and trust His work instead of your own. You discover your eternal destiny in a new way. You realize how special and important you are to God whether anybody else knows it or not, and that is enough.

Your ego is no longer a major problem, and your buttons don’t get pushed like they used to. Finally, it is not all about you! Now you begin to realize you know a few things personally in your heart that used to be in your head. You discover that you like who God made you to be, and you look at yourself in a new way. You are now ready to experience the butterfly stage.

Now you fly:

A butterfly doesn’t weigh much. Butterflies are carried around a lot by the wind. They go from place to place quickly, as they know their time is short. They feed as they go and don’t land anywhere for too long. They taste a lot of flowers and flit from here to there just enjoying life. They are free!

They don’t spend a lot of time looking at all the other butterflies and comparing their beauty to the others. They enjoy landing in the sunshine and just resting, slowly fanning their wings or just laying there opened up receiving. They go where they go, leaving beauty and pollen that feeds the other plants so they can reproduce.

They don’t know why they do what they do, they just are. And if you could get a butterfly to stay put very long, you might ask them how it feels to be a butterfly. They would probably tell you that it doesn’t matter, and they don’t have time for those kind of questions. Just wait until you are a butterfly, and you will know!

I don’t think most of us just go through this whole process once. I think we go through it many times at deeper and deeper levels. However, I thought it would be fun to look at this and write about it because I do feel like that butterfly in our garden of love flowers. And I truly enjoy the taste of all God’s love flowers in our garden. It is a great, safe place for butterflies to rest.

By Miryam