the promise of wings
Just when the caterpillar thought his life had ended, he became a butterfly. ~Proverb
For days, we stare at the five chrysalides hanging from the top of the butterfly habitat Zoe requested for her birthday, anticipating new birth. Transformation is something we are passionate about, knowing it to be God’s skill, His masterpiece. He’s woven that soul-deep, the way He planted eternity in our hearts, immovable (Ecclesiastes 3:11). God gave butterflies for active remembrance, creation repeating Truth. Metamorphosis is something we live.
I point out the glinting gold spots on the pupae, the signs of things to come, beauty all wrapped up in transformation, an ivory cape. We are used to celebrating small things. In a house where autism lives, no sign of progress goes unnoticed. Every word, every engaged moment, every new freedom shines beautiful. Every change matters. I wonder, from time to time, if the angels watch our transformation that way, anxiously awaiting, pointing out each sign of the Spirit’s work. “And we all,” the Word cuts sharp,
who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).
Zoe moves her finger in the air in long, sweeping arcs, noting the indentations on their chrysalis-cloaked sides, the lines becoming more defined by the day.
“That’s where their wings are forming,” she says, enthused. Oh, the promise of wings. No wonder, when we’re young and innocent and full of faith, before life weighs us down, we all think maybe we can fly.
Zoe’s attitude, during the larvae stage, had been lukewarm. Admittedly, Painted Lady larvae are ugly, black, pointy. They come in the mail in a lidded plastic cup, crawling over their food, which looks like coffee-colored wax. By the time the larvae have grown fat and have molted, the cup starts to look like it’s half-full of sticky, black tar. Nothing exciting happens until the little population crawls to the top of the cup, away from the goop, and hangs upside-down, growing still. It’s always that way: first things get really dark and nasty, then the resurrection.
There were days, when my children were small, when I wondered if life would ever change for us. When Riley turned three, she couldn’t speak at all. She pointed, grunted, reached, and dragged us by the hand, pushing our arms toward things she wanted. She lined everything up in rows, making long straight lines out of the world, which for her held nothing but isolation and chaos. She couldn’t make eye contact with us. She rocked back and forth, flapped her hands, walked on her tip toes. The year she started school, Adam’s diagnosis swallowed up the last shreds of hope that one day life would be free of a word we never wanted to know. I dropped Riley off at school and took him to therapy, opened my door for still more therapists to see him in our home. In the midst of trying to do a thousand normal things, I spent hours trying to force my children to see me, hear me, imitate some silly sound I made while blocking their passage to the place they really wanted to go, their view of something they really wanted to see. I found little enthusiasm in the larvae stage. Things were ugly and tedious, progress so slow. I thought it might never end. Until the day we chose joy, our little world just grew dark, sticky. I could not see anything else, though I clung desperately to the promise of harvest:
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up (Galatians 6:9).
Sometimes we watch, we wait, hanging on as the world turns upside-down.
Zoe got excited the day she noticed the chrysalides, the day she knew there would soon be butterflies. We threw away the cup, carefully transferring the group, hanging from a thin circle of tissue paper, to the butterfly habitat. Wings necessitate a larger space, room to fly. She started planning for their food, telling me we’d need apples and cuttings from the butterfly bushes in our yard. She started thinking of names, knowing that Life happens after transformation, the old gone, the new here (2 Cor. 5:17).
I still remember the day Riley said her first complete sentence, the way my jaw dropped, the way hope took root. I remember the first time Adam said “I love you” on his own, unprompted, unforced. So many firsts, engraved on my heart, the evidence of chrysalis. I remember every element of metamorphosis, the way I’m sure that God remembers mine, the first signs of my life as a new creation, the promise of wings. He allows me to see again and again what He’s done, how He’s changed us all. What joy, what grace. How silly that we sometimes live still like larvae, ignoring our ability to fly.
On Sunday, we watched the bumpy ivory tombs for movement. As yet, they remained still, dead, pieces of their larval bodies hanging beside the chrysalides, like heads lobbed off. “Uh-oh,” Zoe said, “those didn’t finish.”
I smiled. “No, they just don’t need those old parts anymore. They’re going to be brand new.”
We watched, waited, anticipating. Zoe looked up pictures of Painted Ladies in her Butterflies of North America book. “Oh, Mom, look. They’re going to be beautiful,” she breathed. I wonder, does Heaven wait that way, watching for the glimpse of Glory in me?
That afternoon, she called to me, her voice lifting with excitement. “Mom! Mom! One of them came out!”
Inside, the first butterfly hung upside-down, still, elegant, waiting for its wings to dry. Zoe started talking to it, rubbing it’s belly through the mesh. We put in a quarter of a sweet Honeycrisp apple and watched the brand new butterfly find its way there, bumbling, half-flying, half-falling, for a first taste of the juice. That night, when Zoe went to bed, she put her butterfly habitat on the floor next to her. “Butterflies are my pets,” she said, softly, “and when it’s time for these to fly away, I’ll raise some more.” It’s our gift, to live metamorphosis. We wouldn’t trade it.
Two days later, Zoe found three more butterflies waiting for their wings to dry. Every change brings stillness, waiting, the pause that God uses. “Mom, we’re gonna need more apple,” she told me.
The last butterfly to emerge was the only one she actually saw as it fought its way out of the thin husk of chrysalis. Half way out, and she thought it had died. She brought the habitat to me, mourning the loss. “Look Mom,” she said, sadly. “Remember, I told you I thought I saw a crack in this one while it was changing.”
When a butterfly emerges, its rolled wings look crumpled, its head and antennae too large. This one still had work to do. I opened my mouth to speak, explain, soothe her worry, and it started moving, thrashing in the husk of its old self.
“Mom! It moved! It’s not dead!”
“No, it’s not. That’s how they get strong, fighting their way out. Give it time. It’ll flap it’s wings yet.”
The process never fails to astound me. Every time my children change, it’s rough at first. It feels like three steps back follow the two we managed forward. They’re awkward, wings still rolled up, thrashing their way to some new place. The fighting makes them strong, like the fighting we must all do to be changed, our weakness drawing us closer to God.
Richard Fuller once said, “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” The early dark days, the slow changes, the waiting, the fighting, at times nothing in it feels like transformation.
But this I’ve learned, this I offer those anxiously waiting:
Give it time, they’ll fly yet.
You’ll fly yet.
There’s the promise of wings, and God is faithful.
There is, within each one of us, the potential to become a butterfly. ~Flavia
