Good morning…
It was a Wednesday, last August 1st, 2018. As I drove into work I remember prayerfully pondering which book to teach for our annual Lovett Senior Moms Study group, slated to begin in mid September. Because it was raining, I parked in the inner most part of the church parking garage. Walking up the first flight of steps in the stairwell, I looked down to notice something quite unusual. There at my feet was a motionless yellow butterfly, completely whole and totally dead.
I thought to myself, “I can’t leave this gorgeous creature on this hard, grey cement.” So I took out two credit cards and, carefully balancing the fragile body, I toddled slowly down the stairs toward my parked car.
“What are you doing, Sue?” our church receptionist’s voice startled me. She was quickly coming up as I was carefully coming down. I tried to explain my desire to take this beautiful creature home, to give her a soft landing, a nurturing place for her final rest. As I shuffled precariously past this wonderful woman, I bet she thought I had lost my mind.
I laid the winged one in the comfort of my back seat and headed back up the stairwell to “get to work.” On the second flight of stairs, I looked down and, no kidding, there was another dead butterfly lying on a step. Black. Pristine. Perfectly formed, whole. So you know what I did. I got back out my two credit cards and I repeated the drill, walking slowly down the stairs, tucking the black creature in beside the yellow one.
Marveling for a moment at these two creatures of God, an idea suddenly dawned on me. The sight of a black and yellow butterfly lying side-by-side reminded me of a drawing in Trina Paulus’ beloved book, Hope For The Flowers. See for yourself the picture sparking my insight, an image found on page 143 of book written in 1972.
A picture book would be a very odd read for a group of grown women to discuss for an entire semester. “God, this seems like a really weird choice,” I thought, trying brush off the strange thought. But as I sat with the possibility, the creative idea began growing on me. Returning home at the end of the day, I set the two completely whole butterflies in a shadow box for safe keeping, a glass frame I had happened upon months earlier at a nearby Goodwill.
Two days later, I took the shadow box to a mountain getaway in Cashiers, North Carolina to share my dead butterfly discovery with two of my best friends. When we were hiking that weekend, we happened upon another yellow butterfly so much like the first. Dead. Whole. Gorgeous and glorious. I picked up a leaf and slid it beneath the beautiful winged body. The leaf, like a medical stretcher, curled around the creature as I carried her home to the safety of the framed shadow box.
When I returned home from Cashiers, I glued the three creatures securely inside the glass frame. Feeling a growing sense of confirmation, I took a risk. I taught Hope For The Flowers in the fall, which lead seamlessly into our spring read, Sue Monk Kidd’s When The Heart Waits, another book about our spiritual transformation mirrored by the journey from caterpillar to butterfly.
The shadow box pictured on the top of this post lives in our living room as a lasting symbol for me that when the LORD has a life lesson to teach, the Spirit of God will find surprisingly creative ways to speak to us clearly. Our daily job is to prayerfully ponder, to notice the unusual, the odd, the weird, to let strange ideas grow, and to accept God’s invitation to land softly, securely, at rest with the Spirit.
God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word (Romans 6:10, MSG).
…Sue…
