Hope for the Flowers

We have much to hope from the flowers.

~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Tell me, sir, what is a butterfly?"

"It's what you are meant to become. It flies with beautiful wings and joins the earth to heaven. It drinks only nectar from the flowers and carries the seeds of love from one flower to another. Without butterflies the world would soon have few flowers."

"How can I believe there's a butterfly inside you or me when all I see is a fuzzy worm? How does one become a butterfly?"

"You must want to fly so much you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."

"You mean to die?"

"Yes and No. What looks like you will die but what's really you will still live. Life is changed, not taken away. Isn't that different from those who die without ever becoming butterflies?"
--Hope For the Flowers by Trina Paulus

How does one become a butterfly? How does one get the courage to go from caterpillar to butterfly? What gives one the faith needed to take the risk to enter the cocoon in order to become a butterfly? More prosaically, how does one become a committed Christian? How does one get the courage to go from carefree to completely devoted? What gives one the faith to take the risk to become a Christian? How does one know the decision will pay off, that it will be worth it, that there will be no regrets? What makes one risk the only life they know for the mere possibility of eternal happiness? What does one have to go on, except what others say about their experience, and the peculiar hope that leaps within them at the promise of salvation?  

Augustine once said “the soul is restless until it rests in God.” And C. S. Lewis explained in his book Mere Christianity that it is not possible for man to live apart from Christ because "God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

So, there is in us a need for God. And it is natural for us to seek for a way to fill that need, just as it is natural for a caterpillar to eventually perform the task necessary to become a butterfly. A caterpillar, though, has no choice. A caterpillar cannot not become a butterfly. It must become one, because that is what a caterpillar does. Similarly, we cannot escape the urge to enter into a relationship with God. The difference, though, is that we have a choice, where a caterpillar does not. We can choose to ignore that natural drive towards a connection with God. We can choose to deny our need for a Higher Power directing our lives. We can choose to ignore our hunger for spiritual nourishment. But if we choose any one of these options, we will not be choosing happiness, too. And that, very simply, is it in a nutshell--or, rather, a cocoon.

There are risks, of course. Risks which are not so simple as entering into a cocoon one day and coming out a butterfly the next. And it is those risks which get in the way of so many, keeping them from experiencing the greatest love and satisfaction ever imagined possible. No one is born a spiritual butterfly. All of us come into the world as caterpillars. And all of us have to deal with metamorphosis, eventually. How we do so is what keeps us caterpillars or frees us into butterflies. Sooner rather than later, there must come a time when we need to decide to continue the caterpillar lifestyle or go through the process of becoming one of the most beautiful of all fliers. 

I like the way The Message describes the metamorphosis experience in 2 Corinthians 5:16-20: “Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.”  

It is at that point there is hope for the flowers.